Book-Review

I do a lot of speaking at conferences, user groups, online, and other sorts of events. It’s important to constantly improve, so I take notice of any books released on the topic. I recently listened (via Audible) to TED Talks - The Official Ted Guide to Public Speaking by Chris Anderson.

I’ve been a fan of TED and their conference talks for a long time. The overall quality of the talks is very high, and some (like Ken Robinson’s talk on schools killing creativity) set a really high bar.

2020-01-07

I’ve mentioned before that Orin Thomas tends to give me many good book recommendations. The Future of Capitalism by Paul Collier is another of Orin’s recommendations. I notice from the cover that it’s also highly recommended by Bill Gates. So it had to be worth a look.

I ended up listening to this via an Audible audio book. It’s quite a long book at around 9 hours 26 minutes.

Overall, I loved this book. I’d have to say though, that it took me quite a while to get into it. I just didn’t find the first chapters all that compelling. But strangely, I then really did get into it.

2019-11-19

Over the last few months, one of my Kiwi buddies (and fellow member of both the MVP and Microsoft Regional Director programs) Reza Rad has been organizing a bunch of us to write a book that’s a collection of ideas from a number of MVPs. It’s the Power BI MVP Book.

There are a whole lot of authors from a whole lot of different countries: Reza Rad, Anil Maharjan, Indira Bandari, Liam Bastick, Ken Puls, Jesus Gil, Thomas LeBlanc, Ike Ellis, Matt Allington, Leila Etaati, Markus Ehrenmüller, Ashraf Ghonaim, Eduardo Castro, Manohar Punna, Treb Gatte, Gilbert Quevauvilliers, Michael Johnson, Shree Khanal, Asgeir Gunnarsson, Greg Low, Gogula Aryalingam.

2019-08-16

I’ve got a number of friends who’ve been writing books over the last few years. Sadly, there seems to be no relationship between when I buy a book and when I actually read it.

And that’s the case with Blood Rush by Bob Simms.

Bob is an old SQL Server trainer friend/colleague and I bought this book back when Bob first mentioned that he’d written it. I only got to actually read it last week.

2019-08-02

One of the depressing things about watching TV is that producers (and in particular Hollywood-based producers) seem to have a very skewed concept of what happiness comes from.

Here’s a bit hint: it’s not from wealth or fame.

I’ve made enough trips around the Sun to know that anyone who believes what that TV is telling them, is being conned, big time.

Now I’m not saying that being poor is fun either. It’s not. In particular, anyone who’s deeply in debt would understand that they have very little control of their own lives.

2019-07-26

About a year ago, I attended a conference called DevOps Days in Newcastle, Australia. I wish I’d liked the conference more. But one of the memorable things from the conference was a keynote by David McRaney.

All the people around me seemed to find David’s keynote interesting. Ironically though, I also heard many of them wondering what on earth it had to do with the conference topics. David provided example after example of how we all suffer from confirmation bias. I enjoyed his keynote.

2019-07-19

I’ve mentioned previously that I’ve come across Graeme Simsion previously in his role as a well-known data modeller, based in Melbourne here in Australia. I’ve recorded a podcast with him many years ago, on my SDU Podcast series. So perhaps I have a slight bias towards him as an author.

I was so excited to see the endless well-deserved congratulations he’s received for his initial Rosie Project book. I thoroughly enjoyed that book.

2019-07-12

A while back I purchased a number of Audible titles, thinking I’d listen to them as I traveled around. I grabbed a number of ones related to presentation and I thought I’d also check out some general self-improvement titles.

What I didn’t realize, is although they had different titles, I’d basically bought a number of copies of essentially the same book, but with different titles. This was one of them.

2019-05-31

One of the things that I love about digital books and audio books is how quickly I can go from a friend talking about one, to actually having it. This book is one of those. I can’t actually remember who recommended this one but I recall looking it up immediately and purchasing it. It’s The Little Book of Luck by Richard Wiseman.

Wiseman is a professor for public understanding of psychology in the UK. He states his interests as “unusual areas including deception, luck, humour, and the paranormal”.

2019-05-21

One of my Kiwi buddies who specializes in Power BI is Reza Rad. I was pleased to see he had a set of eBooks now on Power BI but was especially happy to see he had a book called Pro Power BI Architecture.

There are lots of books around to discuss how to use Power BI but there’s been a real lack of books on architecting solutions using Power BI. So if you want to learn to develop dashboards or reports, this isn’t the book for you. Reza has other books for that.

2019-05-10