Book-Review

I was pleased to see Reza Rad’s latest book Pro Power BI Architecture: Development, Deployment, Sharing, and Security for Microsoft Power BI Solutions: Rad, Reza: 9781484295373: Amazon.com: Books now out the door. Reza is an old friend, fellow Data Platform MVP, and fellow member of the Microsoft Regional Director program.

I was pleased to have been a technical reviewer for this book, and I hope that, along with the other reviewers, we have improved what was already a good book.

2023-08-28

I’ve been fascinated by what happened at Chernobyl for a long time. Many of my readers wouldn’t know that when I first started university, I was studying nuclear physics and mathematics. Wasn’t long afterwards that I headed into computing but, at the time, there were very few degree courses on what’s now called computing.

I decided to move on from that study for many reasons, but a primary one was that I could see Australia heading into a pretty solid ban on using nuclear power. The only reactor running in the country was a high flux reactor at Lucas Heights and was used primarily for producing medical isotopes. (It was replaced by a 20MW open-pool lightwater reactor in 2007).

2023-08-12

I’ve been a big fan of Shaun Micallef for many years. So I was very excited to listen to his new book Tripping Over Myself, A Memoir of a Life in Comedy both to learn more about his background, and to hear his thoughts on it.

I truly appreciate his sense of humour, and as someone who speaks publicly regularly, I appreciate watching his timing and delivery. That’s the number one reason why I wanted to listen to this on Audible rather than reading the book. Shaun reads the book himself, and I knew that hearing him deliver the content would add to the value it brings.

2023-07-29

I’m a fan of Seth Godin, and have always enjoyed listening to him. Recently I finished listening to Leap First on Audible. 

When I started listing to this book, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. I always enjoy Seth’s anecdotes. At first, the book seemed more like a series of anecdotes than an in-depth treatment of the topic. It seemed to lack a continuous train of thought. I started feeling like I was listening to a collection of anecdotes from Seth, rather than a “real” book.

2023-07-06

Ever since I watched Professor Alice Roberts’ series on travelling Egypt by Train, I’ve been quite a fan of her work. (It also means I probably came to knowing about her later than I should have). Since then, I’ve been working through a number of her books. On Audible, I just finished listening to The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being.

Amongst many other things, Alice is an English biological anthropologist. She also worked as a doctor in the National Heath Service in Wales for a while, but she left clinical medicine to focus on anatomy.

2023-06-11

Over the last year, I’ve come to know Alex Kolokolov more, through involvement with his data visualization challenges. I was really pleased to see he’d written his first book Make Your Data Speak (Creating Actionable Data through Excel For Non-Technical Professionals).

Things I Liked

I really liked the conversational style of the book. It’s all structured around  an approach of “Let’s see how this happens by example”. The tone was really refreshing and should be good to hold people’s interest.

2023-03-12

I was pleased to be sent a pre-release copy of Benjamin Nevarez’s new book SQL Server Query Tuning and Optimization. Last time, I reviewed his High Performance SQL Server book.

This book seems to be somewhat new and somewhat an update, but this time with the main focus on query tuning and optimization. That’s pleasing as the main way to get better performance out of SQL Server is to fix the queries. much more so than anything to do with the hardware or server configurations that so many people focus on.

2022-08-05

One weekend many years ago, my youngest daughter Erin was looking for something to do. She was a very creative child so I suggested “why don’t you write a book?”

She said she could write one, if she only had a title. I told her that you could write a book about almost any title. I randomly picked:

What the duck didn’t see

(with the emphasis on didn’t)

To get her started, I wrote some content, then asked her to continue. She did the same, and then I wrote some more. I turned out to be quite fascinating. I had no idea where she was taking the story and I’d be excited to read what she’d written. Along the way, my eldest daughter Kirsty wrote some content as well. My second daughter Andrea’s name was used for the main person in the story.

2022-01-25

It’s been a while coming, but my latest book is now out. Implementing Power BI in the Enterprise is now available in both paperback and eBook. The eBook versions are available in all Amazon stores, and also through most book distributors through Ingram Spark distribution.

I’ve had a few people ask about DRM-free ePub and PDF versions. While the Kindle version on Amazon is their normal DRM setup, you can purchase the DRM free version directly from us here:

2021-06-18

I get a lot of book recommendations from friends. One that I’d heard about a number of times was Mark Manson’s book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life so I thought I’d check it out.

I don’t overly love the title. I think having expletives in book titles is a bad omen. For me, they are in the same category as, and are reminiscent of, childhood fart jokes. And the book is full of endless repetition of the same expletives. I can only imagine Manson thought they made for good shock value. For me, they don’t.

2021-04-07