Book Reviews

These are book reviews. Books are on a variety of topics: technical, business, personal growth, and some are just plain fun.
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
QBQ

QBQ

QBQ stands for the question behind the question. This little book is about the questions we ask ourselves in our head and about getting to the question behind the question and taking personal accountability. It’s about changing our inner dialog and asking questions that serve us instead of asking
2 min read
The Go-Giver

The Go-Giver

The Go-Giver is a great reminder that the key to success is giving. I know it sounds paradoxical. It certainly does to the main character in the book. He is a go-getter and he is chasing success, but not quite finding it. He is under a lot of pressure to
2 min read
The Go-Getter

The Go-Getter

You have probably heard the phrase “So and so is a real go-getter.” The implication is somewhat obvious – they go and get what they want. However, you might not know where it came from. It comes from a short story called “The Go-Getter” written in the 1920s by Peter B.
2 min read
Rhinoceros Success

Rhinoceros Success

This just a fun little book to read. You can’t take it too seriously. I think given what we are living through right now it is very timely for 2 reasons: 1. We could all use a good reason to laugh. 2. It is a good reminder that being
1 min read
Who Moved My Cheese?

Who Moved My Cheese?

“Who moved my cheese?” is a very timely book given what we are all going through right now. It is a time of great change for all of us. This book is about how we think about and deal with change. It’s a short parable. It takes about an
2 min read
Corona Virus Reading List

Corona Virus Reading List

Being self-employed sometimes it is difficult to shut work off. You are very vested in the outcome and there’s always more to do. Working from home makes it especially difficult because there isn’t that physical separation of actually going into the office. Being stuck inside for this Corona
2 min read
Secrets of Consulting

Secrets of Consulting

Consulting is the art of influencing people at their request. Secrets of Consulting page v When I first started doing consulting, I thought that most problems were technical. Boy was I wrong! I quickly learned that most problems are not technical, but are people problems. If I had read “ Secrets
2 min read
Art of Unit Testing 2nd edition

Art of Unit Testing 2nd edition

I originally bought this book on Fab’s recommendation. I had read the XUnit Test Patterns book and I liked it, but I thought it was rather large and cumbersome. It was 900 pages, so I was looking for something smaller and lightweight that I could recommend to people. I
3 min read
Click Here To Kill Everybody

Click Here To Kill Everybody

This is the second Bruce Schneier book I have read. It is every bit as good as the first. This book is a commentary on the current state of cybersecurity (and the future) for what Bruce calls the Internet+. The Internet+ includes everything connected to the internet; not just servers,
3 min read
The Agile Samurai

The Agile Samurai

I was first put onto this book by Fabiola. She mentioned the Inception Deck in one of her presentations. That caused me to do some research and stumble upon the book. If you haven’t heard about the inception deck, you can check it out here as well as in
3 min read