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Book Reviews

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

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
Book Reviews , Unit Testing

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
Book Reviews , Security

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
Book Reviews

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
Smart Marketing for Engineers
Book Reviews

Smart Marketing for Engineers

I saw Rebecca Geier talk at NI Week a few years ago. She was promoting her new book Smart Marketing to Engineers. I picked up a copy but didn’t get around to reading it until last year. I found it very insightful. The book starts off with some typical
1 min read
Book Review - Refactoring
Book Reviews

Book Review - Refactoring

This is a book I read a few years ago. It is a very useful book. It’s considered a classic in software engineering literature because it introduced the idea of code smells and because it gave names to a bunch of common refactorings. Code smells are things that indicate
1 min read
El Alquimista
Book Reviews

El Alquimista

The Alchemist by Paul Cuehlo is a great book that I highly recommend. It is a great reminder to chase your dreams and ignore the naysayers. It also reminds us that having a dream is not the same as chasing it. If you have a dream get up and follow
1 min read
Ego Is The Enemy And The Obstacle Is The Way
Book Reviews

Ego Is The Enemy And The Obstacle Is The Way

As I wrote in a previous post about philosophy and coding I was not always a big fan of philosophy. I viewed it as an academic pursuit, a bunch of eggheads sitting around thinking about thinking. I never saw the practical value. That is until a read a pair of
2 min read
Automate the Boring Stuff With Python
Python , Book Reviews

Automate the Boring Stuff With Python

* NI recently added Python Integration to both LabVIEW and TestStand. * Danielle Jobe’s presentation at GDevCon last year and her hands-on at NI week this year were both on integrating LabVIEW and Python. * I had a job this year where there was potential for more work to be done but
2 min read
Book Review Code Reviews 101
Book Reviews

Book Review Code Reviews 101

I recently read this book on code reviews by Giuliana Carullo. I quite enjoyed it. I wrote a review on GoodReads and on the LabVIEW Champion’s book recommendations. I thought I would just post about it here to help get the word out some more about this great book.
1 min read
Data And Goliath
Book Reviews , Security

Data And Goliath

Nothing is private on the internet. Most of us understand this idea intellectually. We realize that we are being surveilled at some level, but most of us do not grasp the depth and breadth of that surveillance and what exactly it is used for and the implications. Bruce Schneier does
3 min read
Age of Wonder
Book Reviews

Age of Wonder

At GDevCon, Allen and I were talking about books we’d recently read and I was reminded about a book that I read last year called “Age of Wonder”. A friend had given it to me 5 years ago when I moved from Pittsburgh to Denver and it took a
2 min read
Guns Germs and Steel
Book Reviews

Guns Germs and Steel

Guns Germs and Steel is a very interesting and entertaining book. Similar to the last book I reviewed, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Gun’s Germs and Steel challenges the reader’s view of the world. It starts with a very simple narrative that we are all familiar with and then
2 min read
Outliers
Book Reviews

Outliers

I’ve had several very interesting conversations lately. I had a great conversation with Allen, Shane, Danielle, and Oli after GDevCon2. I had another fascinating conversation with Fab and few others after the CLA Summit. Most recently I had a conversation after Social Media Day Denver. All these conversations had
4 min read
XUnit Test Patterns
Book Reviews , Unit Testing

XUnit Test Patterns

If you want to know everything there is to know about xUnit Testing, then xUnit Test Patterns by Gerard Meszaros is the book for you. I must warn you, it is not light reading (it’s almost 900 pages) and it is not geared towards beginners. You should at least
2 min read
Book Review - On Intelligence
Book Reviews

Book Review - On Intelligence

A year or two ago I was at a dinner at NI Week and I got to sit next to James Loftus. We were discussing artificial intelligence and he said “Oh you have to read this book called On Intelligence”. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is all the rage these
1 min read
Design Patterns - A review
Book Reviews , Design Patterns , OOP

Design Patterns - A review

I recently finished reading “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” by Erich Gamm, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissades. Due to its popularity, the length of the title, and the fact that it has 4 authors, it is affectionately known as the “Gang of Four” book or GOF
4 min read
Business Book Recommendations
Book Reviews

Business Book Recommendations

It’s January and the time of year where everyone starts planning for the year to come. If you like to read as I do, you may be making lists of books to read in the New Year. If you are, I’ve got a few books to recommend. These
4 min read
Gitting Started With Git
Book Reviews , How to , SCC

Gitting Started With Git

What do you use for source code control? While I was asking everyone I met at NI Week about what frameworks they were using, I also started asking about source code control as well. Almost everyone I talked to universally said they were using some kind of source code control.
6 min read
Good Introduction to UML
Book Reviews

Good Introduction to UML

UML Distilled by Martin Fowler Unified Modelling Language (UML) is a standard way of graphically describing and designing software. If you are like a lot of LabVIEW programmers (myself included) and are a physicist, scientist or engineer by training and not a computer scientist, you may not have been exposed
3 min read
3 Marketing Books Worth Reading
Book Reviews

3 Marketing Books Worth Reading

We are all in Marketing. I know this blog is supposed to be about LabVIEW and automation, but if we’re honest, we are all in marketing. Whether you work for yourself as a consultant or if you work for an Alliance Partner or some large industrial company, you constantly
6 min read