Saturday, February 23, 2008

Book Reviews Kick Off

My Agile/Technical/Consulting bookshelf is coming along nicely.



I have always been a bit of a book hoarder, and being introduced to Agile was more than enough encouragement! Christmas 2007 was especially fruitful since I pointed everyone in my family at my Amazon wish list and I got a nice little haul.



There are also a couple more titles that didn't make it in time for Christmas...

  • Patterns Of Enterprise Application Architecture - Martin Fowler
  • Domain Driven Design - Eric Evans
  • The New Turing Omnibus (66 excursions in Computer Science) - A.K. Dewdney

In fact, it was my birthday last month and I took the unprecedented step of asking people not to buy me any more books. I reckon I can make time to read about one a month so I'll be doing well if I finish this lot before next Christmas!

Reviews

As I pointed out in my previous post, most Agile technical literature is focused on software development using Object Oriented languages and I think it's important for the development of Agile that we publish research into how to apply this vast resource of knowledge and experience to Data Management.

Now I have an influx of new books, I think now is a good time to start publishing reviews. I expect the format and structure of the reviews the evolve as I learn what works best but I think it will be helpful to the reader if I were to give each book a headline score that is easy to digest...
  • Overall Score - how much did I get out of the book. Ranges from 1 to 5
  • Relevance to Data Management - how much of this book is relevant to people on data management projects. Ranges from 1 to 5.
  • Technical vs Management - 1 pure management, 2 bit of both, 3 pure technical


Let's see how we get on with that. I'm off to review a book now...

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