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More reading, “Little Green Book of Getting Your Way”

Like “Cut to the Chase“, the “Little Green Book of Getting Your Way: How to Speak, Write, Present, Persuade, Influence, and Sell Your Point of View to Others (Jeffrey Gitomer’s Little Books)“ was a quick read; Unfortunately, it wasn’t as engaging for me.

I’ve seen some of Gitomer’s books before, so I knew they had a “sales” angle to them, but somehow I expected this one to be a bit more about negotiating then selling. My mistake.

The lessons:

• Be passionate about what you’re selling
• Add value — be interested in solving people’s problems, not selling them a solution
• Be funny
• Be entertaining
• Be confident
• Be persistent
• Write a lot

All good lessons, and good things to practice; But there wasn’t enough substance for me to recommend the book.

Finished reading “Cut to the Chase”

I picked up “Cut to the Chase: and 99 Other Rules to Liberate Yourself and Gain Back the Gift of Time“ on the recommendation of Personal MBA reading list. It’s a quick read, containing 100 short (< 2 page) tips on professional behaviors that reduce wasted time.

In the spirit of cutting to the chase, I’ll summarize with a few bullet points:

Pros:

• A quick read
• The short chapters make it easy to pick up when you have a few minutes
• The lessons are good, and tend to reflect the habits of effective senior management
• Feels like the kind of book you could pick up once a quarter to glance over the Table of Contents as a reminder to focus on what’s important
• If you’re new to the professional world, reading this will definitely give you an insight into the type of behavior you’re likely to encounter when interacting with senior management; And it should help you prepare for the type of communication styles expected of you

Cons:

• If you’ve been in business for while, you probably should know this stuff already
• If you’re new to the professional world, you may have fewer opportunities to practice this stuff (though better to get started now then not know how to manage your time when you are tasked with greater responsibilities)
• Depending on your work environment, the lessons may be a little too “harsh” — ie., these are techniques for efficient time management, not for making friends

Overall, my reaction is positive. There were certainly a few lessons in there that I look forward to applying to my working style.

Finished reading “10 Days to Faster Reading”

When the Personal MBA manifesto came out back in 2005 (see The Personal MBA: Mastering Business Without Spending a Fortune for the original), I read through the list, jotted down a couple book ideas, but mostly just left it at that. Lately, however, I’ve been reading more business books, and I thought I’d give the list another look.

The idea of a Personal MBA has grown momentum, and the list of books has been kept fresh. This time around, I pulled out maybe half-a-dozen that sounded interesting; But before diving in, I took the recommendation to brush up on my reading techniques using “10 Days to Faster Reading.”

Before starting the book (and perhaps still now), I would have described my reading style as slow, steady, and thorough. I read to comprehend, debate, understand, and work the material into my world view. That’s also a fancy way of saying that I’m not the quickest reader, but that I pay attention. That said, I’m always interested in learning something new and boosting my productivity.

My mindset going into “10 Days to Faster Reading” was open, interested, willing to learn, but somewhat skeptical that it would work for me. My assumption about speed reading was that it focused more on skimming then on deep engagement. Fortunately, the book changed my view a bit.

One of the biggest takeaways for me, was the idea that when we’re young, and learning how to read, we’re taught to slowly go through each word at a time because we’re still building our vocabularies and teaching our eyes how to parse written text. Unfortunately, as we get older, our education systems tend not to re-visit reading skills in a manner more suited to our growing ability to process words. This is why adults can boost their reading speed — they have the ability to process text at a rate faster then we normally use, if you can teach your eyes how to do it.

Each chapter in the book contains lessons and timed reading exercises. With stopwatch in hand, I tracked my progress. Here’s my results: (Note that each chapter often had you applying a different technique, so progress wasn’t meant to be linear)

My times definitely improved, though comprehension suffered as the pace increased. Interestingly though, two things came out of this:

1. If 70% comprehension is good enough (ie., if all I need is to get the gist of something), it’s possible to really crank the speed up.
2. Familiarity with the subject matter makes a huge difference. (Which is why previewing and skimming before reading can make a big difference.)

I still need more practice, but at least now I know what to work on, and I have a handful of techniques to experiment with. So far, I’ve found the best application to be with Newspaper and magazine articles, along with online news where I just need the general story.

Overall, I’d say that the potential boost in reading productivity was worth the $9 book price and the time it took to read it.

For more:

• Speed Reading (on Wikipedia)
• Can a “Personal MBA” Match the Real McCoy? (on Business Week)

A few more books…

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted a reading list. Here’s a few more books I’ve read recently that are worth mentioning:

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science — A fantastic overview of the field of Economics. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this book (and how much I want to find another one like it!) Thanks D’Arcy!

The World Is Flat — A lengthy read on globalization, global markets (and global opportunities.)

Halting State — An enjoyable Sci-Fi I picked up after a review on Boing Boing. Starts with a bank robbery in an MMORPG…

Spook Country — Sort of a sequel to William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition” (at least, there are some character and plot overlaps.) Like Pattern Recognition, it’s not cyberpunk; But it’s a fun read.

DMZ Vol. 1: On the Ground and DMZ Vol. 2: Body of a Journalist — I got these graphic novels for Christmas and read them both in one (long) sitting. I enjoyed the experience, but not so much to order the next couple in the series.

Stealing the Network: How to Own a Shadow — The third (or forth, depending on how you look at it) installment of the series. It’s on par with the rest of the series — enjoyable, but not stellar. The tech is a little more simple this time around… and the whole story is essentially a setup for the next book.

Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment — A fairly small book with a nice message — mastering a discipline takes time and a willingness to enjoy the journey.

Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation — I’ve flipped through a number of books on meditation, but this one has a nice way of applying it to modern lifestyles and explaining how to use meditation and self-centering throughout your day (not just via the stereotypical meditative pose.)

The Black Widow’s Guide to Killer Pool: Become the Player to Beat — The first book on playing pool that I ever read. It’s got some nice stories, and some nice lessons on getting your head in the game, but it’s definitely beginner-focused (which was what I needed when I read it.)

Byrne’s New Standard Book of Pool and Billiards — A key read in bumping my pool skills from beginner to intermediate. I learned A LOT from this book, but it’s technical and primarily filled with diagrams and explanations. This isn’t a quick read — you study each page to grasp the subtleties of each shot.

Come, Let Us to Billiards Away — Out of print and hard to find. Completely wrecked my game while explaining aspects of speed, stroke, and ball control in ways that no one else seems to tell. While the two billiards books above take the approach of a “pro” telling you how to play, this book is told from the perspective of a retired hustler opening his bag of tricks. And boy does he have some unique ways of seeing the game. The chapter on bank- and kick-shots was worth the price of admission. I’d be happy to shake Jack White’s hand and thank him for writing this book.

Cooking Curries — The Half Price Books near me had a bunch of these on sale the last time I went in. I’ve cooked about a half-dozen of the recipes in it, and I’ve enjoyed all of them. Great pictures as well.

The Wisdom of Crowds — A thought-provoking read that sparked the crowd-sourcing movement.

Reading “The Definitive Guide to Django”; Verdict: A solid learning reference for a beginning/intermediate Django user

Last week I received a review-copy of the new “The Definitive Guide to Django” book from Apress. I hadn’t planned on buying the book since it seemed a little too beginner-focused; but I agreed to give it an honest reading, so I happily dove in with an “it’s Python, of course I’m going to like it” attitude.

Background

The book was written by Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss, the creators and “Benevolent Dictators” of the Django Web Framework. It was Holovaty and Kaplan-Moss’ first book, and, I believe, meant to be the first Django book to market. The book was drafted online; open to peer-review and community feedback; and ultimately published under the GNU Free Documentation License.

From the get-go, the print edition had a few inherent market challenges to face: First, the entire book is available online, for free, at: <http://www.djangobook.com/>. Second, in many ways the book is a re-hash of the docs available at <http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/>, which are also free. Third, the book covers Django 0.96, not SVN. (0.96 is technically the latest-snapshot release, but a lot has changed since 0.96.) And finally, the $45 MSRP could be seen as a little steep for what is effectively a printed copy of a free, online book.

The print experience

Diving in, the book takes the reader through the basic installation process, provides a brief background on how the framework came to be (and why you want one), then steps through the major features (ie., the template system, ORM, URLconfs, generic views, etc.) It’s what you’d expect from a technical reference — no fluff, and straight to the details. There are plenty of code snippets to learn from, and the sidebar notes tend to be insightful.

Since it wasn’t new material for me, the book was a fairly quick read; but the experience of reading Django documentation in book-form was actually quite fascinating. There’s something about settling into a comfortable chair with a book, pen, and highlighter that you just can’t get with online documentation. Perhaps it was just a little more noticeable given the material. When I read the Django docs online, I tend to skim over them while trying to solve a problem. I use them as a reference more then a learning tool, and it’s usually while actively coding, thus my brain is partially distracted with whatever it is I’m building.

With a physical book, you can unplug, step away from the computer, and give the material your undivided attention. This isolation from distraction results in a much deeper understanding of the text. This is the real the value of the printed book — it’s an opportunity to digest online documentation in an environment more conducive to learning and retention.

My general take-aways and observations

• The book definitely has a beginner/intermediate feel to it, but only in the sense of a beginner Django user — not a beginner Web developer or Python programmer. I’m curious how well the book is received by folks who are beginners at Django and dynamic Web development since the text brings up a lot of complex topics in Web development that aren’t really explained. (Ex., database administration, server clustering, manipulating HTTP headers, etc.)
• The breadth of the book is impressive, but in some ways, the book really feeds you through a firehose, so to speak. It throws a lot of new concepts at the reader and doesn’t always explain why you’d need to know them, or how you might use them in the real world. For someone deploying a site with Django, it will be good to know that all these features are available, but it might take awhile before they need to use them (if ever.)
• The book does touch on some of the more advanced Django features (like extending the template system and writing custom middleware), which was nice, but some topics are reserved for the appendix and get limited coverage (ex., model managers and ‘Q’ queries.) Others, like the Sites Framework, are given good exposure, but not so much that the reader is left with a clear picture on when to use them and what their limitations are.
• The forms processing chapter was a bit lighter then what I was hoping for — especially given that the current newforms documentation still trends toward “read the source code.” It provides enough to start using newforms if your form needs are pretty basic, but doesn’t address creating your own widgets, or any of the fun stuff you can do once you start dynamically generating and manipulating newforms objects.
• It might have been nicer if the examples in the book were a little more tied together, perhaps all focused on building a single example project and showing how the various features are used in real-world applications. (The example of the book-publisher’s app was a reoccurring theme, but not so strongly that each chapter applied it’s new learnings to it.)
• The Deploying Django: “Going Big” sub-section provides a nice infrastructure graphics for how high-traffic systems might be setup, but once you get to the point of being “big”, you need to architect for it, and that’s really outside of the scope of this book. For this section, it might have been nice to reference other resources on scaling infrastructure, and perhaps pointing out some of the ways that Django can be optimized for performance and horizontal scaling. (For example, one of the Django projects we put into production at work will happily support 1,200 requests/second, but the database layer and session middleware have been reworked a bit, and the content caching approach is a little different then the standard Django offering.)
• On the more positive side, even as someone who’s been using Django for some time, I still learned a few new tricks, and I was reminded of a few features that I could be taking better advantage of. (And when you do this stuff professionally, every shortcut and productivity gain has monetary value — avoiding even a half-hour of debugging pays for the cost of this book.)
• This book would make a fantastic read for a back-end developer joining a project that is already using Django. I normally tell new developers to go through the Python Tutorial at <http://python.org/doc/tut/> if they’re new to Python, then to complete the Django Tutorials at <http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/> before trying to grok any in-progress Django project. Now I have a third reference (though I might still suggest that they walk through the tutorials first, so that they have some context when reading the book. Otherwise, there are just too many new concepts to do a straight read-through and still grasp it all.)

Summary

The market needed a good Django book, and this one delivered a solid reference for the framework. Arguably, it’s not really a “Beginner’s Guide to Django”, but hopefully it covers enough of the basics that future books can focus on best practices and more advanced techniques. (On a related note, there’s apparently an upcoming “Practical Django Projects” book, also from Apress, that will focus more on building “reusable Django applications from start to finish”. This might actually make for a better beginner’s book, depending on how it turns out. [Via The B-List: Speaking and writing].)

The million-dollar question then, is “Should you buy this book?” My answer ended up being a bit more positive then I expected, but there are two parts: First, if you’re a front-end developer only, you don’t need this book. You can just read Chapter 4: The Django Template System online, and then use the “Django Templates: Guide for HTML authors” section of the online docs as a reference. For back-end developers, the story is different. If you’re going to just “read it while you hack”, then you might as well just read it online; but if you’re serious about building applications with Django (especially if you’re new to it), then you should consider the book and investing the time to step away from the computer and really let yourself get into it. Unless you are an active contributor to Django (which I’m not, just to be clear), the odds are pretty good that you’ll learn something new, even if you’re already using Django today.

Another trip to the book-store…

It’s been awhile since my last “reading list” post, so I thought I’d make another. The following are books I’ve picked up over the past six months or so:

• The End of Eternity — You have to throw a little classic sci-fi into the mix, and this Isaac Asimov story doesn’t disappoint.
• The Big Moo — Grab a copy if don’t have it. Very inspirational.
• Getting to Yes — I have just started this one, so not much to say yet. But it was recommended as a good book on improving negotiation skills.
• The Tipping Point — Fantastic. Grab Blink while you’re at it.
• Freakonomics — Haven’t started it yet.
• Ambient Findability — This one’s been on my wishlist for awhile now, and I just got it for my birthday. I saw Peter Morville’s presentation at SXSW this year, so I look forward to the book.
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion — I grabbed this when I bought “Getting to Yes”.
• Head First Design Patterns — I’m still working on this one, but it’s definitely interesting.
• Behind Closed Doors: The Secrets of Great Management — This was an odd book. It reads like a documentary about a good manager. It made it feel like I was “at work” while reading it, but it does have some good advice if you’re thinking of moving into a managerial role.
• Pragmatic Version Control: Using Subversion, 2nd Edition — I use Subversion pretty regularly, but I’m self-taught and I thought it might be nice to pick up some best-practices for working with branching and external projects.
• Practices of an Agile Developer — Shouldn’t be anything new, but it does a great job describing how an Agile team can work, without coming across as “eXtreme” ;-)
• Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects — Like “Practices of an Agile Developer”, this is one of those “I wish this is how things went” books. It describes a lovely goal for software projects, and did help push me a little to ensure that all the toys I’m working on have fully automated test suites.
• The Art of the Start
• Micro ISV — A decent read about starting one-person software development companies.
• Ultimate Garage Handbook — A thin book on turning your home garage into a shop. It’s more of an intro then a complete how-to guide, but it still covered a few things I didn’t know.
• Fab — Too much theory and not enough practical. Skip this one.
• Stealing the Network: How to Own an Identity — This is part three in the series, but really it’s the sequel to part two. If you enjoyed the first two, you probably want this one as well.
• Work the Pond! — This is a quick read on business networking. I picked up a couple tips, but if you’re only going to read one book on the value of networking, read Never Eat Alone.

more reading…

I just finished reading “Never Eat Alone“, by Keith Ferrazzi, and “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell. Both were a quick read and enjoyable.

“Never Eat Alone” is classified as a business book; However, it’s really about the benefits and practice of maintaining one’s social network — both for business success and personal life enjoyment. Definitely recommended.

“Blink” is a little harder to pin down. It’s obviously written by someone very enthusiastic about how psychological and sociological factors affect our initial reactions to products, people, and situations; However, it does float around a bit on the topic and doesn’t seem to reach any conclusions through it all. (Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing.) It also devotes a fair amount of coverage to the concept of “thin slicing”, which is the ability to predict things like personality based on a very thin sampling of behavior. Some of the research findings on thin slicing were quite interesting, and overall I definitely enjoyed it; However, if you don’t share an interest in psychology, you might pass on this one.

I got through Blink a little too fast, so I had to go book shopping again. Fortunately, I made a stop in Boston right when I needed a book, which made it easy to find “Democratizing Innovation“, by Eric von Hippel. I looked for this book in Austin a couple months ago with no luck; However, being published by The MIT Press makes it an easy find in Boston. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a little different then I was hoping for, so you might want to preview a bit of it using the free PDF version online before deciding to purchase. It’s not bad — it’s just not what I wanted.

I also had “Thoughtless Acts? Observations on Intuitive Design“, by Jane Fulton Suri on my list, but unfortunately, it turned out to be a small picture book. Interesting, but again, not really what I wanted. Instead, I now have “In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters” by Merrill R. Chapman next in the queue. A friend let me borrow this one, and I’ll be diving in once I wrap up Democratizing Innovation.

Cancelled my Safari subscription

I cancelled my Safari subscription today. I love the concept, but I found I simply wasn’t using it enough to justify the cost. I also found my typical usage to be a bit strange — what I loved about the service is that it enabled me to do searches over reference materials that I typically already have in print and on my physical bookshelf. For example, I might be writing some code and think, “man, I know I saw an example of this in one of my books.” Well, instead of digging through it, I could use Safari to quickly do a keyword search. Eventually, the realities of this set in: I’m paying $20 a month to have online access to books I already own. That’s just silly. What I need is a different service. I want to purchase at a very low cost, or download for free, PDF versions of books that I buy in print. That way I can have a searchable copy on my laptop, but I don’t incur an ongoing fee to use it. It could work the other way around too, where upon purchasing a physical book online, I’m allowed to download a PDF version right away. (This sounds a lot like the Beta Books concept, which I think is wonderful.)

If anyone has pointers to such a service, I’d love to hear about it.