Book Reviews

These are book reviews. Books are on a variety of topics: technical, business, personal growth, and some are just plain fun.
Legacy Code First Aid Kit

Legacy Code First Aid Kit

In general I hate digital only books. I much prefer physical books, but this one, like Dive into Design Patterns is worth making an exception for. Nicolas did a great job with this book. It covers 14 different tools to help get you started working with legacy code. If you
1 min read
Peopleware

Peopleware

This book was recommended to me many years ago by a friend, but for some reason it took me a while to get around to reading it. I read it immediately after reading “Why Employees Are Always a Bad Idea” and a lot of the ideas seemed the same. Tom
1 min read
Why Employees Are Always a Bad Idea

Why Employees Are Always a Bad Idea

Dilbert has been poking fun at corporate America for quite some time now. It wouldn’t be so funny if it did not contain some truth. Corporate America is broken and we all know it. “Why Employees are always a bad idea” explains why Dilbert resonates so much and what
2 min read
Fab and Richard's Book

Fab and Richard's Book

As many of you know, last year Fab co-authored a book on LabVIEW with Richard Jennings. I was fortunate enough that she asked me to review a few chapters for her. As a way of saying thanks for that, she sent me a free copy. I’ve had it for
3 min read
Introduction to LabVIEW FPGA

Introduction to LabVIEW FPGA

I will start this review off by saying I am not much of an FPGA programmer. I took the NI class over a decade ago and I have an sbRIO dev kit sitting at home that I have played around with, but that is about it. On some previous cRIO
2 min read
Foundations of Information Security

Foundations of Information Security

I’ve always had an interest in cybersecurity. By listening to Security Now and the Darknet Diaries podcasts, I’ve learned a lot. But I’ve never had any real formal security education. This book is a great introduction and overview of information security. Foundations of Information Security reads like
1 min read
How Clients Buy

How Clients Buy

I am a programmer not a sales and marketing guy. I struggle with it, yet it is vital to running your own business. I spend a lot of time studying both sales and marketing. So much of what is out there is geared towards retail and not professional services. It
1 min read
Selling the Wheel

Selling the Wheel

If you’ve done any sales training you know that a lot of it sounds the same: ABC – always be closing. Pick up the phone and make cold calls. Aggressively qualify leads. They all spout a lot of the same things, as if sales was this one monolithic thing. As
2 min read
Permanent Record

Permanent Record

If you haven’t heard of Edward Snowden, you probably haven’t been paying much attention. He definitely made the news a few years ago by exposing the extent to which the NSA was spying on American Citizens. His revelations really made American’s re-think online security and privacy. He
2 min read
Start with Why

Start with Why

Simon Sinek rocked the business world several years age with a Tedx talk called Start with Why. He introduced the idea called the Golden Circle which talks about What we do, How we do it, and Why we do it. His thesis is that most people talk about what they
1 min read
Making Work Fun

Making Work Fun

For many people work is a four-letter word. It’s something they do because they have to. Maybe they once enjoyed it, but now they are feeling burnt out. It doesn’t have to be that way. In his book the Fun Formula Joel Comm lays out an alternative to
1 min read
Continuous Delivery

Continuous Delivery

A year or two ago, I was talking to Nancy about my interest in Continuous Integration (CI). She put me onto this book called Continuous Delivery (CD). It’s a little dated. The technologies have changed but all the principles still apply. If you are interesting in learnig more about
4 min read
How To Be An AntiRacist

How To Be An AntiRacist

Occassionally on this blog, I write about things that appear to have nothing to do with LabVIEW. This is one of those times. Although I do think this topic is relevant to anyone who works in a team setting, which is most of us. Most teams these days tend to
1 min read
Good Content

Good Content

You may be aware of our Virtual Coffee events. If you are not, just send me an email to sam (at) sasworkshops (dot) com and I’ll send you an invite. Several of us who attend the Virtual Coffee, also run our own businesses. Malcolm Myers was nice enough to
2 min read
How Linux Works

How Linux Works

This is a book that has been sitting on my shelf for a while. I started using Linux about 5 years ago when I started my own business. Starting out on my own required me to be my own IT guy so I setup a Redmine and SVN server. The
2 min read
The Richest Man in Babylon

The Richest Man in Babylon

I have been listening to Dave Ramsey since I got out of college. His principles did help me to pay off all of my college debt and start off on the right foot. I have been listening to conservative financial advice ever since then. I had heard of “The Richest
2 min read
Guerilla marketing

Guerilla marketing

This book is slightly dated. The edition I read was published in 2005. That is before smartphones and social media became all the rage. Things have definitely changed since then. This book still has some value since it focuses on principles. The execution certainly has changed but the principles are
1 min read
Docker in Action

Docker in Action

Note: for more on Docker itself, see here. Chris Stryker has recently put a lot of effort into getting LabVIEW to run inside of a Docker Container. This is really exciting news. I think this is really a huge step forward in improving Continuous Integration (CI) with LabVIEW. It offers
3 min read
Sales Bible

Sales Bible

I used to be part of a business coaching group called EntreLeadership by Dave Ramsey. It was a good group of people. One guy, Eric put me onto this book by Geoffrey Gitomer called the Sales Bible. He was enthusiastic about it, so I bought a copy. It sat on
2 min read
Endurance

Endurance

This particular book had been recommended to me several times. It is quite popular in the outdoor recreation community and also in the business leadership community. To tie it into LabVIEW a little: I saw Scott Kelly speak at NI week last year. I was quite impressed, so I bought
2 min read
Git For Teams

Git For Teams

The traditional approach to teaching git is to start with the details of how git stores and indexes content and build upon that to get to the commonly used commands. This method does give you a really good understanding of what is going on under the hood. It does a
3 min read
A Great Intro To Unit Testing

A Great Intro To Unit Testing

As many of you may know Fabiola De la Cueva and Richard Jennings came out with a new LabVIEW book this year (actually the 5th edition of an existing book) LabVIEW Graphical Programming. I have been meaning to write a review, but I have put it off because I haven’
2 min read

The Nature Of Software Development

This is a quick read by Ron Jeffries, one of the signers of the Agile Manifesto. the book really justs lays out how to do Agile Development, but not in a preachy way or a proscriptive way. It’s more of a high-level picture of what the whole process looks
1 min read
Technical Leadership

Technical Leadership

This is the second book by Giulianna Carullo that I have read. I read her book on Code Reviews last year. This book on technical leadership is also quite good. I will say that her sense of humor does not show up as well in this book. It is a
2 min read