Publisher Affiliations
DOSUG receives special discounts from the following publishers:
Review of Confessions of a Public Speaker
I've got a vested interest in the topic that Scott's book focuses on -- public speaking. I spend about 50% of my life doing exactly that. But I also realize that there are always ways I can improve in this area, polishing, tuning, and taking advantage of the wisdom shared by the prominent members of this profession.
Scott's book takes you through the entire journey of leaving an office job, testing your personal limits, and learning as you go in the field of public speaking & writing. It's written in a fun and engaging style that sits you in the passenger seat right next to Scott the entire way.
This isn't just an ordinary how-to manual, though there are plenty of points to be gleaned for your personal improvement as a speaker. You get the backstory, the seeds planted when Scott was growing up, and some humorous anecdotes like "The clutch is your friend." You may even decide to mold some of these bits into your next presentation as ice breakers.
Scott even reveals the parts that you think he's going to leave as vague. The dollar figure of a check he gets handed for a speaking engagement. His annual salary. Mistakes in his past presentations. And how to cope with a near empty room when you were expecting a crowd. When was the last time you read a work of biography that was this revealing? It's a true delight!
In sum, this book is a must have for the shelf of any public speaker alongside other classics like Slide:ology, Presentation Zen and Beyond Bullet Points. You'll gain a different kind of knowledge from this book. A set of principles by which to improve your character that will make you not just a better speaker, but a better business-person. Grab three copies for your friends that are tasked with any form of speaking in 2010. I did exactly that and got a glowing set of thank-you notes for it.
Pragmatic Thinking and Learning Review
Pragmatic Thinking and Learning is a hard book to read; Please let me explain. You'll bring a copy home, and you'll read a chapter or two. You'll extoll some of the cool outside-of-computer-science references, research, and applications that you've learned in those first chapters. Family members, co-workers, and friends that are around you or visiting will say, "oh, sounds interesting, can I borrow that for a few days." Being the nice person that you are, you'll say "yes" and loan them the book. It will come back in about 2 weeks. You'll really want to read past chapter 3, but a visiting family member will pick it up and take it for 2 weeks. You'll really want to get past chapter 4, but now your boss is reading it. This pattern continues for much longer than you'd like. The solution there is just to buy as many copies as you can reasonably expense.
The book shares many nuances to things you might have already known about learning, but couldn't quite put words to. I'm a big fan of Mind Maps. This just reinforces my addiction. This book also is a parallel to Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds and Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte: Paper, doodles, scribbles, and lo-fidelity mediums are a means to stimulate and bolster more regions of our brains and project information better to our audiences (for those of you that teach, in any capacity).
Other parts of the book are again, well written references for things we "feel", but now have Andy's words to point at. These include the operational differences between junior, mature, and advanced practitioners in a given field. It also includes how pressure kills your ability to perform your best. And lastly, the book has an overarching theme of how establishing learning time, work time, and play time can be a key to higher level performances and achievement.
This will be the most unusual book you'll read in the computer science genre, but the one that changes more aspects of your life for the positive than any other. And remember, buy additional copies, or you'll never get past chapter four in 2009.
JQuery In Action Review
"jQuery in Action" provides a much-needed introduction to the Javascript library changing the way web site interactivity and AJAX behaviors are performed.
Thanks to authors Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz and their exemplary style, this comprehensive book, or operating manual as it might be called, can be taken in a front-to-back approach to learn from scratch, or as a reference to those already dabbling in jQuery and needing verification of best practices.
What makes code examples truly useful and quick-to-understand is the formatting: numbered captions and notes integrated with code describing functionality in prose, along with programming language, makes understanding concepts quick and straightforward.
Designing for the Social Web Review
Review: Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter
As a developer and designer involved in the social web app scene, I'm always looking for insights to a project whether it's in a conceptual or production setting. "Designing for the Social Web" by Joshua Porter not only addresses social application viability from a design perspective, but provides insights for ground-up development that all involved individuals should take into account.
Every designer and developer should have this title as a must-read--as it ties core objectives and framework together. Chapter 2 "A Framework for Social Web Design" and chapter 3 "Authentic Conversations" establish a groundwork for software and interface developers in understanding a successful structure for social applications.
At 177 pages, this book is a quick-enough read that anyone involved in the social web applications should give it a look.
Slide:ology Review
Only since I've purchased Presentation Zen have I've been so changed by a book about presenting, education, and sharing ideas with others. This book is about the mechanics of assembling a better presentation; who better to write it than the queen of presentations, Mrs. Nancy Duarte. Just one of her claims to fame (and a rightful one at that) is designing the slides for An Inconvenient Truth, presented and turned into a movie by Mr. Al Gore.
I only wish I could afford to drop off copies of this book at the desk of every colleague that I interact and present with at DOSUG, DJUG, and beyond. The transformation that the ideas contained in this book would have on their presentations is simply phenomenal. Nancy builds incrementally on each step in the book, taking you to better and deeper approaches to improving your presentations. She gives away her insider secrets on assembling slide order (spoiler: post it notes, used in creative ways + thoughts about snow globes), and what to put (and not to put) on your slides. You'll be surprised what she tells you to leave out.
If you are a casual or professional presenter you owe it to yourself to buy a copy of this book. Your presentations will be transformed to a higher level of training for your audience.
Adobe Flex 3 Training from the Source
Adobe Flex 3 Training from the Source is a kick-start guide to learning the revolutionary "web 2.0" capabilities this present and ever-growing technology provides. Authors Jeff Tapper, Michael Labriola, and Matthew Boles establish clear, step-by-step tutorials and application development that are clear and easy to absorb no matter the scope or scale of coding.
What's best in the 26 lessons is the gradual build-up of skills--each lesson carefully stretching previous chapter's elements and taking them to a new level of programming and extension. This build-up and repetition of skills helps to solidify concepts, syntax, and best practices while never becoming redundant.
Whether readers come from an existing Flash/ActionScript background, an application designer needing additional coding skills, or as a total newcomer to OOP concepts and Rich Internet Application development, Training from the Source is the finest start.
Without a doubt, this book steps up to the challenge of introducing and showcasing the amazing capabilities Flex 3 has to offer and opens a door to endless possibilities for all involved in the design, development and deployment of Internet-base applications.
Bulletproof Ajax
A Brief But Thorough Tour of Ajax
Bulletproof Ajax will surprise you at first at its slim 196 pages of content. But as with any book, it's the density of good information and quality of writing that count the most. I find both to be on the mark in both respects. The content is timely, relevant, and very up to date. As we all know, the landscape in web design can make one thing hot and another not in a matter of months. It is a credit to the New Riders+Peachpit group that they could get such a relevant book on shelves while it still packed a punch.
This book is best suited to the newcomer to Ajax that will appreciate the entire survey of how it came to be, how the XMLHttpRequest limitations hold you back from accessing any other domain than the one serving up the page. However, Jeremy quickly shows you the workaround -- JSON and the script tag, which have no such limitations. This is an example of the dense and useful content I said this book is notable for.
The author then explains his methodology for gracefully degrading Ajaxed pages that he calls the "Hijax" approach. You would be right to ask, why do I need the author to tell me about degrading? I just want to Ajax everything on my pages. But the author gives you insight into the hodgepodge of support the various Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari browsers provide, each with their own quirks. This is a real timesaving chapter. Learn from the author's research on this topic.
Lastly, the book gives you a full beginning-to-end tour of applying all you have learned in the book in a chapter they title "Putting it all together." As a "just get me to the code" kind of guy, this is the chapter I immediately turned to when I opened the book for the first time. I definitely think persons new to Ajax will covet this chapter. It assembles all the building blocks for Ajax in a way that will make it click for most developers.
In summary, this book is brief, and not exhaustive, but that's the very reason I purchased it. It doesn't get wordy, the chapters are accurate and information-packed, and the book concludes with a nice bringing-it-all-together example that lets you see a tangible manifestation to everything you have learned. This books comes with my strong commendations.
JBoss In Action
Manning is set to release JBoss in Action in or around May of 2008.
Here is Matthew McCullough's review of the Early Access of the book:
I've been a user of JBoss Application Server for several years now. It has firmly encroached into the territory of WebLogic, WebSphere, and Geronimo and is proving to be the dominant player in the appserver realm.
This book nicely takes you from downloading, installing, to thoroughly using and exploiting the power of JBoss AS. If you are an advanced user, skip ahead a bit. If you are new to JBoss, start right at the
beginning and let the authors help you get started.
No detail of JBoss is left uncovered in this book. The authors touch on topics such as MBeans, deploying your apps, the archtecture of the classloaders, and the JMX console, just to name a few. If there's an aspect of JBoss you are yearning for a few words to a full explantion of, just search this book. You will find it, guaranteed.
The most important and valuable section of this book is the section on Security. Locking down and understanding the means by which people could surrepitiously gain access to your apps is nearly as critical as building your app. I think the authors do an excellent job of covering this aspect.
In closing, I feel this book does excellent justice to the latest version of the JBoss Application Server 5.0. The authors write in a clear and informative style and I highly recommend you purchase it upon its (soon) release.