by Peter Seibel
-- A fantastic collection of interviews with 15 famous programmers. Contains some great history and insights on the field of "computer science."
-- Geeks, drugs, and deception. An entertaining look into the (fictional) lives of techno con artists, and how a recently-fired comic book artist get pulled into their inner circle.
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-- Particularly useful reference when trying to eek out a few extra milliseconds of load times in older browsers.
-- Interesting tech, and somewhat engaging, but disappointing ending (or lack thereof.)
, by Neil Strauss
-- An engaging, first-person account on transforming from an urban writer into "Jason Bourne."
, by Cory Doctrow
-- A high school hacker fights the 'Department of Homeland Security' to reclaim American civil liberties after anti-terror tactics are taken to a new level.
-- Techniques-for, and the value-of sketching interactivity before developing products. Good ideas. OK book.
" -- About finding untapped opportunities in your market and repositioning yourself to capitalize on them. Easy to grasp; Longer then it needed to be.
" -- A thin book with some good best-practices, but a little disappointing. Perhaps it's JavaScript's fault, not the author's ;-)
" -- Good overview of usability issues in designing HTML forms, backed by examples and eye-tracking research. I bought the 
" by Marshall Goldsmith
-- Discusses interpersonal skills (and how to identify and fix them) that most commonly hold executives back in their career advancement.
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-- Lesson: Cut the corporate B.S. and stop wasting your time. Focus only on what matters most.
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-- Lessons on handling tough conversations: firing people, relationship problems, hostage negotiations (well, maybe not that last one.) Wasn't an exciting read, but I've been paying more attention to "turning points" in conversations since reading it.
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-- Lessons in building reusable ("pluggable") Django applications. Assumes you know the basics of Django and Python.
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-- I really enjoyed this one. Lots of suggestions and strategies for negotiating.
Gizmodo has a piece today titled “Embracing the Mobile Hacker Ethic” that covers Python for Series 60, Macromedia Flash Lite, and the Maemo Platform as technologies that empower individual developers to create their own mobile applications. The article also happens to feature a few quotes by me :-)
“If people are going to innovate, they need to feel comfortable rapidly proofing new ideas and throwing away code when something doesn’t work,” Smartt says. “That’s less likely to happen if application development takes months. With Python for Series 60, it should be possible to produce a simple proof-of-concept application in an afternoon.”
Obviously that’s taking a narrow view on what “innovation” can mean, but it builds on my recent post: “Extreme Programming vs. Interaction Design” where I tried to make a point that high-quality design and user experiences come from iteration and trial-and-error, and the more places that an “iterative culture” can be adopted in product development, the better the products will be.
Thanks Gizmodo (and Carlo) for helping to promote the Python for Series 60 project!