The Sherpa Project

I was excited to see James put up 22books. The site is off to a great start and reading is something that I’m very passionate about. I read a lot of books and I frequently check in with others about what they are reading.

A tradition that I’ve had over the past ten or so years of my career has been to ask others “What books have you read that have changed your life?”

I ask this question for a couple of reasons…

• It gives you an idea of an individual’s personality.
• It gives you an idea of where a person’s values and belief system are.
• It helps you understand a person’s world-view
• It keeps my queue of books-to-read fresh

I’ve asked this to quite a few people over the years. I’ve asked co-workers, friends, managers, CEOs, and clients. Over the years of asking this question, I’ve never regretted it (although I have had some people that declined to answer it).

I love that James has integrated this concept into 22books as a list category. I’m excited to see what others add to their list.

If you’re interested, my list is published on the site. Some of these books are fairly straight-forward in their contribution to my favorites list and others have stories behind them. Regardless of the history, I can certainly recommend all of them.

Happy reading!

I blogged before about my initial impressions of Natural Capitalism. I’ve finally completed the book and I can highly recommend purchasing a copy or downloading it.

If you want a preview of the (very dense) book, take a look at A Roadmap for Natural Capitalism article that was published in Harvard Business Review.

I usually don’t rave about books until after I finish reading them. I’m going to make an exception because I just completed reading two great chapters that are already worth telling everyone that this is shaping up to be a wonderful read.

The book I’m referring to is an older book (1999) called Natural Capitalism. I’ve only spent two evenings with this book and I’m already a huge fan.

The book is big and dense, but it has a ton of thought and supporting evidence behind it. Simply put, this book kicks ass.

I’ve heard this book mentioned a few times by a few different people, but I decided to buy it after seeing it referenced by Ryan Martens during a presentation at Agile 2007. Ryan pleaded his case for the “greening of software” and made a few interesting references to the book.

My mind is swirling with ideas and thoughts after flipping through the introductory chapters.

You can find the book on Amazon or you can download it (chapter by chapter) on the Natural Capitalism website.

Over the weekend, I read Collaboration Explained by Jean Tabaka. This is one of the best books that I’ve read in a really long time. The book is geared towards the facilitation of agile software teams.

The book includes a wealth of information on how to facilitate, prepare, and follow-up on many different types of collaborative exercises, meetings, and interactions within agile teams. There are a ton of prescriptive techniques that are very effective in dealing with multiple levels of teams through various stages of a project.

I can highly recommend this book for anyone acting in a coach, ScrumMaster, facilitator, participant, or leadership position on any agile project. The book is extremely insightful and entertaining. I went through two highlighters while reading the book

I’ve played around a bit with Ruby and Rails over the past couple of years, but I haven’t done any significant programming in either. After attending CodeMash and sitting in on a few great sessions around both Ruby and Rails, I decided to start using Ruby as my primary scripting language and I made a commitment to play around some more with Rails.

The best resource that I’ve had had in both of these situations are each respective cookbook from O’Reilly. I’ve always known enough to hack around, but it’s been wonderful just skimming the books and getting a grasp on the capabilities and common tasks for each one.

I’ve found out a lot about how to effectively use Ruby and I’ve found many capabilities that I didn’t think that were possible (at least easily) with Rails.

These books are both great resources, superbly written, and deserve a place on your bookshelf.

The time has finally come for the official release and availability of Windows Developer Power Tools. I briefly posted about the book before, but it was during the editing process and before the release of the book. I received my copy of the book about a week ago and it feels great to see everything in print. The book is a great reference guide and well worth the money. I still haven’t made it all the way through the book, but I learn something new every time I sit down and flip through it.

James and Jim have done a great job of writing and pulling together tool authors and contributors for the book. The book covers a lot of breadth and is well worth the time to read through the book.

The articles that I contributed to the book included:

• Finding Changes Between Assembly Versions with LibCheck
• Integrating Mock Objects into Your Testing with NMock 2.0
• Automating Web Application Testing with Selenium Core
• Extending MSBuild Capabilities with MSBuild Community Tasks
• Improving Team Communication and Collaboration with Basecamp
• Examining Logs with LogParser

There’s some great stuff in the book and it serves as a wonderful overview of many different tools.

Jim has posted a list of tools that are available in the Windows Developer Power Tools book. That’s a lot of tools.

Windows Developer Power Tools is up on Amazon and ready for pre-orders. The book hasn’t been released yet (it’s currently slated for November 1st), but it can be pre-ordered. You can find some sample chapters on Jim’s page for the book. The book was written by James Avery and Jim Holmes with a variety of contributing authors (including myself). I’m obviously biased, but I love what I’ve seen of the book up to this point.

There are a lot of great freeware and open-source tools out there and the book helps you navigate, evaluate, and see them in action based on the current task(s) that you are trying to solve. I wish this book would have been written a couple of years ago because it could have saved me countless hours in discovering tools and libraries that would have been a tremendous help.

It has been interesting going through the process of submitting articles for the book and reviewing others. In the process of helping do some light-weight reviewing I’ve learned about a lot of interesting tools, libraries, and concepts that I hadn’t previously been exposed to (and I spend a lot of time playing with development tools).

Simply put, this book is long overdue. Although there is a lot of content, it does a great job of giving you enough information to determine if the tool or library is a good fit to help in your project (or future projects). When you look at the number of tools covered and realize that they are all free, you realize how valuable the concept is.

The book has also has a rough cuts version posted at Safari.

If you want an idea of what the book will cover, check out the table of contents.

I recently completed reading “The World Is Flat” by Thomas Friedman. There are hundreds of great insights spread throughout the book and I can highly recommend the book to anyone that is interested in future of globalization and the dynamics that play into the equation.

The book focuses on a ton of factors including open source, outsourcing, offshoring, economics, innovation, passion, and technology. I admire the research and conversations that are outlined throughout the book and it has opened my eyes to many factors that I previously had not thought of regarding the natural economic evolution towards globalization.

It was a great book and I highly recommend reading it.

I’m eagerly awaiting Getting Real. The crew at 37Signals has been doing a great job lately and I have to say that I love their viewpoints, their simplicity, and the effectiveness of their designs. Hopefully I won’t have to wait too much longer, I’m dying to hear what they have to say and how it is presented.