"Upgrade Your Life" by Gina Trapani

Now here is a book I really do like. Generally I avoid "self help" books, seeing myself as mostly beyond help - especially from myself. However, having spent a while last week in the Tech-Ed bookstore reading this one and trying to make mental notes of all the good tricks presented in this book, I eventually cracked and bought a copy. And it is jolly good too.

It is broken down into chapters that deliver tips to improve your life. It starts with email and then move into data organisation, using the web effectively and even how to motivate yourself to get work done. None of it is really rocket science I suppose, but you have to know these things to be able to use them. For example, I didn't know that Outlook has an option that lets you display all email sent only to you (as apposed to a list with you on it) as blue. (Tools->Organise->Using Colors). You can also flag messages from different people in different colours.

You can read the book from cover to cover and try to remember everything, or you can dip into it at random in the sure knowledge that you will learn something useful. The content is based on material presented over the years at lifehacker.com and covers Windows and Mac platforms, along with good old common sense.

Great stuff.

"Microsoft 2.0" by Mary Jo Foley

Whilst I was at TechEd last week someone gave me a free copy of "Microsoft 2.0" by Mary Jo Foley". It is supposed to tell me "How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era". I'm not sure it does.  I summarised it as follows:

  • Bill Gates is leaving Microsoft and other people will be doing his job
  • The Future for Microsoft is complicated, and almost certainly not the same as The Present

There is a lot of background on the people at Microsoft, which stops just shy of being libelous in some cases. There is some detail on products and where they might be going in the future which you can pick up more easily (and in an up to date form) on the web. There is a a fair bit of repetition. And more than a few errors. The Xbox 360 has never suffered from the "Three Rings of Death" - that just sounds like a very dangerous circus. And Microsoft didn't actually manage to buy Yahoo that I recall...

Each page has big callouts on it, presumably designed for high flying types who don't want to read all the text (and it also reduce the number of words required to fill the 283 pages). My favourite is on page 191 "Microsoft must avoid several obstacles as it moves from the old way of doing business to the new." Yeah. Right.

I did not like this book much, and I got it for free. If I'd paid 29 dollars for it I would be rather cross. Perhaps the detail was lost on me, or perhaps I already know a fair bit of what was being said. Either way, take a look at the text before you part with any cash.

Superb Micro Framework Book

There is already one superb .NET Micro Framework book available (the one wot I helped to write) but now there is another.

Expert .NET Micro Framework by Jens Kuhner is excellent. It is written for those who want to really find out how to use all the features of the framework.

Whereas our book is more of an introduction to the field the Expert book, as the name implies, goes into more detail on the various class libraries and how you can use them. It also has the benefit of having been published a year or so later, and so has more up to date detail on the platforms that are now available. The people "lucky" enough to be at my session yesterday all got a free copy of the book (which really put a spring in their step) and they will find it very useful.

If you are serious about the framework you should get this book. If you are not serous about the framework you should this book and become serious about it.

Why Software Sucks...

There are some books that anyone working with computers should just read. Code Complete by Steve McConnell is one of them. And now I've found another one.

Why Software Sucks... (and what you can do about it)  is by David Platt is a book you really should get. It is not hugely technical. It is not hard to read. It will make you laugh (and if you are a developer promptly feel guilty). It is a text which takes as its starting point the fact that we are not really very good at writing software.

It ties in rather neatly with a lot of things that I tell our students when they are writing programs for other people to use, but it also touches on security and a whole host of other issues, always with humour and always grounded in real life experience.

Even (or especially) if you are not a programmer you must read this book. Excellent stuff.

Clifford Stoll Rocks

You might not have heard of Clifford Stoll. But you should have. He wrote "The Cuckoo's Egg", one of the best books about the Internet and computers that I've ever read. He also maintains a very healthy skepticism about computers and their place in society.  He wrote a book some time back, "High Tech Heretic" which should be required reading for people in computing. It was published in 2000, but is still very relevant today. If you think that computers are the answer to everything, the way and the truth, then you should read this book.

Box of Delights

 
The Word

Got a parcel today. Not from the Post Office, they are on strike, but from DHL. In it were ten copies of my book.  Amazing. I daren't read it, as I'm scared that the first thing I'll see will be a huge glaring mistake, but it is very nice to actually see printed pages wot I wrote. There is even a picture of me on the back.

You can get the book from Amazon in the UK here. And in the 'states from here.

Review : Applications = Code + Markup by Charles Petzold

I was kind of hoping that they wouldn't have it in stock since if they did I would make myself poorer. But there it was on the shelf. Browns in Hull had a copy of "Applications = Code + Markup" by Charles Petzold.  If you have any kind of history in Windows programming you will have come across Charles before. He wrote pretty much the definitive guide to programming Windows 3.1 way back in 1992 (I have a copy) and he has been writing new books about Windows programming ever since.

And now he has come up to date with the release of his book which tells you how to create programs which use the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) which is the way that you create user interfaces for Vista. I've been following the development of the book via his blog (which, although not as good as mine of course, is still worth a read).

I had kind of told myself that I would buy a copy if I happened to come across one, and on Saturday I found that Browns Bookstore in Hull had one in stock. And so I bought it. For the same price I could have got Lego Star Wars II for the XBOX 360, although I think I'll probably have more fun with the book to be honest (but I am a sad programmer).

I've been ploughing through it, but I'm nowhere near the end of its 1,000 or so pages. Charles Petzold writes very well, and I find the material very interesting. Some people might find the level of detail given a bit pernickety and distracting, but I really like it. And the other thing I really like is the approach taken.

I've been trying to make sense of XAML, (the markup language which lets you describe how your forms will appear to the user) and not having much fun or luck. As a programmer I want to get hold of the objects and control them programmatically, not by means of lots and lots of text. And although XAML lets me set up animations of bits and bobs (and you can have a lot of useless fun with this) as a person writing a program intended to do something I don't find the ability useful. Add to that the fact that the MSDN documentation is pretty appalling, actually telling you less than the IntelliSense in Visual Studio, and you have a recipe for frustration.

What the Petzold book does is put all the XAML stuff in the second half, and spends the first half telling programmers how to use the new user interface classes at a very high, and useful, level of detail. I've not reached the markup pages yet and I don't care. I'm too busy finding out how easy it is to lay out user interfaces which automatically design themselves when they load.

One of the very few things that I missed from Java when I switched to C# some time ago was the "GridBagLayout" manager. This was a swine to master, but when you got your head around it you could write displays which pretty much laid themselves out for whatever orientation and size of display you were using. In fact I missed it so much that when I moved to C# the first thing I did was write a layout manager.

With WPF something very similar to GridBagLayout is now available. And the way you use it is way better too. The book makes this clear and uses loads of examples to help you along the way. There are no screenshots though, which I initially found rather surprising. However, the good news is that this means you are encouraged to "code along" with the book, pulling up the examples and modifying them along with the text. This is a very good way to learn, and leaving out pictures means that the book can contain more text, which adds to the value.

In short, I think that this book will become as indispensable to the programmer as the earlier ones have, and if you want to learn how to do this stuff you should bag a copy. Amazon have it on a healthy discount which I wish I'd seen before I bought mine from a shop.

Cool Books

The books that I bought were all published by Taschen. They do some really nice ones on design and advertising. The ones that I bought were really good value, at only 7 pounds each. I got two on advertising (one from the fifiies and the other from the sixties). I would have got the seventies one too if that had been in the shop.

The third was about design. I just love reading this stuff. Some of the pictures are superb:

01fridges

From the days when a fridge was an impressive device.

02projector

I wonder why he has stuck a cigarette in her shoulder? But then again, she seems happy enough about it.

03coolcar

Why don't cars look like this any more?

If you like a good, thought provoking, read you should get these books. Well worth it.