Founders at Work
I don’t like to do book reviews back-to-back but Founders at Work has kept me pretty busy reading (and not writing) over the last couple of weeks. The book definitely deserves a five star rating and at $13 for the e-book version, it really is a great deal. My review follows…
Windows Power Tools
Windows Power Tools is a collection of brief tutorials and overviews of freeware and open source .NET development tools. What kind of rating you might give this book depends largely upon what type of background that you’re coming from. If you’re the kind who has stuck religiously to the Microsoft Press series of books and acknowledge only the old testament, than this book will be either an epiphany (5 stars) or outright blasphemy (1 star). If continuous integration, test-driven development, and object relational mapping (new testament type stuff) are terms that you are fairly conversant with, then this book will probably land somewhere in the 2-4 star range.
Software Engineering, Ethics and the FBI Virtual Case File System
Technologists who spend their time working on line of business projects are typically exposed to subtle and not-so-subtle messages about business ethics. Most recently, the implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has touched most of our lives in some way, shape, or form. At a bare minimum, it has heightened our awareness of how terribly wrong things can go when the trust afforded certain practices (accounting and reporting, in the case of SOX) proves to be misplaced.