Book-Review

I’ve been going through a number of fairly famous books or ones that have spawned their own industry. One of those was Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and it’s all small stuff: Simple Ways to Keep the Little Things From Taking Over Your Life by Richard Carlson.

This one intrigued me as there are now so many follow up versions. There’s a “for teens”, “for men”, “at work”, etc. etc. etc. along with ancillary items like workbooks. So I presumed there must have been something to it.

2018-08-10

I don’t tend to read all that many books on US politics but I had heard interesting things about A Higher Loyalty - Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey.

I was especially interested to hear this one on Audible, given the author was also the narrator. I really wanted to hear him explain his view on the situation.

Generally, I’d avoid a book like this because I was assuming it would just be a self-apologetic or self-aggrandizing account of recent events. What I found though was very, very different.

2018-08-03

When I first heard that Satya Nadella had a book out, I was somewhat surprised as at the time, he had just taken over running Microsoft. Usually you don’t see books from CEOs until they’ve been in the role for quite a while and have become philosophical about things.

But given the impact I could see he would have, I was fascinated to read his book Hit Refresh.

It was actually quite a bit more than I expected. I really enjoyed the tales of his life and how it led up to his current role.

2018-07-27

Another book I’ve read recently while sitting on a few planes is Blockchain - by Samuel Rees.

I’ve seen some big claims in the titles of books but this one had me intrigued:

The Ultimate Beginner Through Advanced Guide on Everything You Need to Know About Investing in Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, Ethereum and the Future of Finance

That’s quite a claim. I was really hoping this book would provide a great amount of detail given it’s ‘beginner through advanced’ guide claim.

2018-07-20

One book that a number of my friends suggested that I read is:

Now I Know: The Revealing Stories Behind the World’s Most Interesting Facts - by Dan Lewis

I wasn’t sure what to make of this book as it just seemed to be a large collection of facts that Dan thought were interesting. Given I love trivia, I thought I’d try it.

Dan started an email list called “Now I know” back in 2010 with a handful of subscribers and grew that to over a hundred thousand. These are basically the topics that ended up being some of the most interesting.

2018-07-13

I have to admit to being a bit of a fan of Neil DeGrasse Tyson, so I was really looking forward to reading or listening (via Audible) to his book Astrophysics for People in  Hurry.

It’s always a bit of a tall order to try to cover something like Astrophysics in a short book. The title reminded of silly book titles like “Applied Multivariate Analysis and Calculus for non-Mathematicians”.

But I loved this book.

2018-07-06

Another book that I’ve been listing to lately on Audible is Greg McKeown’s Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.

This was a very timely book for me. I find it very easy to get endlessly bogged down in minutia, rather than just always focusing on the big picture of what I’m doing. It’s really easy to do that if you have a great desire to get things perfect or close to perfect. But that’s not what you should be aiming for.

2018-06-29

I’ve been reading and/or listening to a lot of books again lately and one that I didn’t have high expectations for, but ended up really liking was Donald Miller’s Building a Story Brand.

If you are a business owner, I’d suggest listening to it or reading it. It takes a really refreshing approach of what he calls using a story brand framework.

When you need to tell someone what your business does, how do you describe that?

2018-06-22

I missed out on getting a copy of this book when Ed Katibah (aka Spatial Ed) was giving them out at his spatial session at a recent conference but I made a mental note to buy a copy and read it. I’ve finally got to do so.

This is a truly excellent book. I think the title belies the contents. I hadn’t been in a hurry to read it as I thought it would just be a “beginner” level book on using spatial data in SQL Server 2008. How wrong I was. This book covers so much of what you need to know to make effective use of spatial data. It spends time on explaining spatial concepts, proceeds to describe the data types and later thoroughly covers all the methods offered by the types. But the real bonus is the in depth coverage of how to use the spatial types in a practical way. Alastair spends time covering geocoding data, building a SQLCLR-based function for geocoding, building procs to return data, building a web handler to offer spatial feeds, building mashups with both GoogleMaps and VirtualEarth using the feeds, etc.

2009-09-30