Beckshome.com: Thomas Beck's Blog

Facebook has long been for me one of the last unexplored realms of social networking. Finally, when trying to convince new recruits to join me in using Twitter, I realized that so many of my friends, acquaintances, and colleagues were hooked on Facebook, I stood little chance of winning them over to Twitter without a deeper understanding of where Facebook fits in the social networking mix. I turned to the book “Facebook Me!” by Dave Awl to provide a solid background in how Facebook might work best for me and to help me understand how to integrate Facebook with the rest of the Web 2.0 applications I use. My review of this book from Amazon.com can be found below.

This book provides the ideal balance between introduction to the Facebook application and reference manual for the more experienced user. The first few chapters will prove a bit superfluous to all but the greenest of newbies. After that, you can count on some pretty solid information on using Facebook to enhance your online social communications leveraging the breadth of Facebook’s communication features. Several elements of the book appealed to me particularly:

• Very visual and, for the most part (ca. July 2009), up-to-date with respect to the latest enhancements to the Facebook user interface
• Offers pragmatic advice on using Facebook features without overhyping features such as messaging, where there are clearly other capable mediums.
• Provides a balanced view of Facebook’s features and alternatives for integrating other alternative mechanisms in with Facebook to augment the out-of-the-box offering.

I can’t emphasize the importance of the last two points to my assessment of the book. It showed me how to integrate other Web 2.0 technologies that I’m very happy with, e.g. FlickR for photos and Twitter for status updates, into Facebook. This integration allows me to enjoy what I believe to be the best of what Facebook has to offer (a huge social network of people you already know) with dramatically more sophisticated, open, and evolved media and messaging capabilities of other platforms.

For the new to intermediate Facebook user, this may be the only book they’ll ever need. More dedicated and fanatical Facebook users might find that this book doesn’t go deep enough. I find myself somewhere in between. I’ve caught on to Facebook pretty quickly but I still don’t plan on using the majority of features outlined in this book. That’s why the book is a solid 4 starts for me. Were I a bit more into Facebook and a bit less into other Web 2.0 technologies, I could see this being a 4.5 or 5 start book.

Since jumping back on the blogging bandwagon, I’ve been looking to get more familiar with the top social networking sites. I’ve had some experiences with most of the major players except Twitter, which I never did manage to get into. I decided to give Twitter a fair chance and see if it worked for me. In order to do this, I felt some basic background / guidance was necessary before jumping in heads-first. Turns out that The Twitter Book from Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein was really all that I needed. My Amazon review follows:

Think of The Twitter Book not as a book but rather like a longer, really well done, Powerpoint presentation. For the most part, the top of every other page of the book has a really clear storyboard message which is explained on the subsequent two pages with creative examples, both textual and using simple, colorful graphics. As countless reviewers have already pointed out, it’s a case of the book medium emulating the tool it’s describing – terse and colorful.

The book is an easy read in an hour, give or take 10 minutes. It also functions well as a reference document if you need to go back and look up Twitter features, such as hashtags and retweets, as you gain more familiarity with the Twitter service. At 231 not-so-dense pages, the book is rightsized for a service that enforces a 140 character message limit.

If you’ve looked at Twitter before and didn’t get what all the fuss was about, give it another shot after reading this book. Try the “Three Weeks or Your Money Back – Guaranteed” plan in chapter 1. You’ve got lots to gain and very little to lose.

A review long overdue for a Jolt Award winner and one of the best architecture books on my bookshelf, Release-It!

I’ve recommended this book to many colleagues of mine and haven’t heard a disappointing review to date. I’ve heard the terms ‘pessimistic’ and ‘realistic’ used with equal frequency to describe this book. Having just completed my second reading, I can affirm that these terms are both representative take-aways. Nygard openly admits to being more than a bit paranoid about the way he approaches enterprise application architecture. Although this may seem alarming to many new to the IT field, those of us who have been around for a while recognize this as a necessary, at times life saving, defense mechanism.

Despite the presence of patterns, this is not really a pattern book that can be read piecemeal. It’s best read and enjoyed end-to-end. The books serves to teach us old dogs some new tricks as well as serving as a way to say “welcome to the field of enterprise application architecture” to team members new to this role.

Book Strengths

• Real world production incidents, just in case you think: (a) you’re the only one who ever gets into such situations; or (b) such things don’t happen in the real world with large enterprise applications (where do you work?)
• The patterns. Even though there’s no sample code, the real value is in describing and cataloging these patterns.

Book Weaknesses

• Organizational inconsistency. Two sections of the book (Stability and Capacity) follow the anti-pattern / pattern approach while the other sections of the book (General System Design and Operations) follow more of a narrative approach.

Yeah, the book focuses almost entirely on Java-based systems but almost all of the book has direct applicability to other enterprise technologies. In the last chapter of the book, Adaptation, Nygard’s writing style tends to wander a bit and deviate towards a rant. However, it’s hard to fault him for this, especially when he states things so eloquently:

Real enterprises are always messier than the enterprise architecture would ever admit. New technologies never quite fully supplant old ones. A mishmash of integration technologies will be found, from flat-file transfer with batch processing to publish/subscribe messaging. Any strategy formulated predicated on creating a monoculture—whether it is a single integration technology or a single programming language—is doomed to be a costly failure.

After more than a year-long hiatus, this entry marks my return to blogging. One of the things I decided to do to get myself back into the spirit of blogging was to change my blogging engine. I made the move from the .NET-based DasBlog to the more mainstream WordPress platform. I will be providing more information about the migration process (specifically, WordPress on IIS 7), helpful tools and tutorials, and useful WordPress plugins in an upcoming blog post.

Knowing very little about how WordPress worked beforehand, I needed a book to jumpstart my involvement with the tool. After a bit of research, I settled on WordPress for Business Bloggers. This book, along with some basic Web-based tutorials on installing WordPress on IIS were all I needed to get myself up to speed. My detailed Amazon.com review of the book can be found below.

Touted as a ‘beyond the basics’ book targeted towards business bloggers, WordPress for Business Bloggers delivers a wealth of WordPress and blogging knowledge in the context of a fictitious case study. I picked up this book as a way to jumpstart my involvement with WordPress after several years of involvement with other blogging tools. I was not at all disappointed with the results.

Based upon my experiences, I can confidently assert that no experience with WordPress is necessary to benefit from this book. The book states the assumption of such knowledge up front and, after that, never returns to WordPress basics. Ample materials on WordPress installation, operations and configuration can be found online and I appreciate that the book didn’t spend any time rehashing these items.

Instead of focusing on simpler procedural activities, the book weaves together the challenges of solving business issues for Chiliguru, a fictitious business blog, with advanced WordPress operations, guidance, and plugins. The book manages to bridge the challenges of running a day-to-day blog with WordPress-specific knowledge in a unique style. One would be hard pressed to cobble together the information and knowledge this book imparts from the web-based tutorials currently available on the Internet. Examples of the unique content covered in this book include:

• Search engine optimization, including coverage of keywords, permalinks, and sitemaps supported by a variety of WordPress plugins
• Integrating social networking content from Twitter and Facebook into WordPress blogs
• Blog statistics analysis with both WordPress stats and Google Analytics
• Integration of Google AdSense and Amazon Affiliate programs into WordPress-based blogs
• Coverage of advanced technical topics including: increasing scalability via WP Super Cache, using WordPress MU for multi-blog environments, and backing-up, restoring and moving WordPress blogs.

If you’re looking for a beginners guide to WordPress, this book is not for you. On the other hand, if you’ve accumulated some basic experience with WordPress or another blogging engine and you’re looking for insight and knowledge to take your WordPress blog to the next level, you really can’t go wrong with this book.

Every IT generation has its seminal tome that transcends time and connects the dots in a way that no book had before it. For the object oriented generation in the 1980s, it was the Gang of Four (GoF) book. For the application architecture generation in the 1990s, it was Fowler’s book on patterns (PoEAA). “RESTful Web Services” will be, in my opinion, that book for the 2000s Web services generation.

There is something absolutely special about this book that readers of GoF or PoEAA will immediately recognize and appreciate. The book covers a breadth of technologies and ideas yet it helps the reader see how they all connect. It uses short code samples (in Ruby, the choice of this generation) to illustrate rather than obfuscate the ideas. Most importantly, it makes the complex comprehensible and delivers epiphany-like experiences throughout the book.

There are too many highlights in this book to enumerate in this review. However, some of the coverage that I appreciated most included:

• The chapters on resource-oriented design, since there was practically no written information available on this topic prior to this book
• The chapter on resource-oriented best practices
• An overview of the service building blocks, including the different representational formats and WADL, which I wasn’t aware of
• The chapter comparing and contrasting RESTful services with the “Big” (e.g. SOAP) service overhead that is common in most enterprise environments

I would have liked to see this book touch on simple POX versus true REST and handle the resource-oriented security concerns in a bit more detail but you can only ask so much of any one book. I’m fairly confident that “RESTful Web Services”, like the seminal tomes that have gone before it, will become assumed reading

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…

This is an absolute must read if you’re job, your passion, or both (if you’re lucky) has anything to do with creating technical innovation. “Founders at Work” is a wonderfully meander through the stories of successful company founders – across several decades. Far from focusing on just those who made it big during the first dot-com boom or those who are profiting from Web 2.0, Jessica also includes some of the true pioneers in the field. She recognizes that, not only do these industry veterans have valuable stories to convey but, since many of them are helping to steer companies and venture capital funds to this day, their advice is quite topical and current.

From the great introduction right through the final interview, this book is packed with great anecdotes, advice, information and inspiration. Makes you wonder as to what the story is behind the story – how did Jessica get unfettered access to such a broad array of the founding fathers?

I’ve included some illustrative quotes from the book below. Give them a read and then go pick up this book. The printed copy is a bargain and the e-book version is a steal. It may turn out to be one of the best investments you ever make.

• “You guys are nuts. Throw out your business plan. Your customers—or potential customers – are telling you what your business should be. The business plan was only used to get you the money. Why don’t you rewrite a business plan that is focused just on providing what your customers want?” – Q.T. Wiles advice to Charles Geschke (Cofounder, Adobe) on the real purpose of a business plan
• “There were some warning signs. Consider McKinsey, which holds itself out as one of the world’s leading repositories of knowledge on how to manage a business. They say they’ll never grow their company by more than 25 percent per year, because otherwise it’s just too hard to transmit the corporate culture. So if you’re growing faster than 25 percent a year, you have to ask yourself, ‘What do I know about management that McKinsey doesn’t know?’” – Philip Greenspun (Cofounder, ArsDigita) on scaling corporate culture
• “That [not improving core product quality] was probably the biggest mistake we made. And that’s the advice I give everybody. All those little coupon schemes, this is what General Motors does. They figure out new rebate schemes because they forgot all about how to design cars people want to buy. But when you still remember how to make software people want, great, just improve it.” – Joel Spolsky (Cofounder, Fog Creek Software)
• “I think some people slept; I know I didn’t sleep at all.” – Max Levchin (Cofounder, PayPal)
• “There were times when we were really broke before we had our angel investment, when only one guy who had children was getting paid.” – Caterina Fake (Cofounder, Flickr)

With nearly 21 of the 32 interviewees having the term “Cofounder” in their titles, Joel Spolsky’s advice seems perhaps to reflect best on what was critical to the success of these companies. “But because they never really take the leap and quit their job, they can give up their dream at any time. And 99.9 percent of them will actually give up their dream. If they take the leap, quit their job, go do it full-time—no matter how much it sucks—and convince one other person to do the same thing with them, they’re going to have a much, much higher chance of actually getting somewhere.”

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.

Since I put myself in the 2-4 star group, I’ll start by mentioning that there are great online tomes of knowledge that contain most of the tools listed in this book and a bunch others not listed here. One of the most respected and well linked lists belongs to the author of this book’s forward, Scott Hanselman. His Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows has been dutifully updated on an annual basis. Despite the fact that there are free, decent resources out there that fill some of the same purposes as this book, I enjoyed thumbing through the book and picking out tools I hadn’t heard of to fill in some knowledge gaps.

The main reason that I landed on a 3 star rating instead of a 4 star rating is that the brief tutorial format that worked so well for James when describing Visual Studio functionality is his previous book, Visual Studio Hacks, just doesn’t do justice to tools that represent significant pieces of an application or support infrastructure. I would have preferred to see less tools and deeper coverage in certain areas. Understandably, since not everyone would want to see the same tools as me; a broader, shallower approach trades off depth and detail for marketability. I’ve included my complete list of pros and cons below so that you can see how I came to my rating:

Pros

• Great reference book with enough of an introduction to get you started with a broad array of tools
• If you’re an O’Reilly Safari subscriber, this book is included in your subscription
• The authors aspire to keep materials current on the book’s companion Web site. At the time of this review, the site is little more than a list of tools in the book

Cons

• Lots of this material is available for free on the Web, if you have the time and inclination to find it
• Introductions to tools are not sufficiently in depth to communicate any more than the most rudimentary of use cases

In a previous posting, I reviewed the 37signals book Getting Real and encouraged folks to pick up a copy. The good news is that the full text for this book has recently been released online. You can find the HTML version of the book here. You no longer have any excuse not to read it.

Programming Atlas, by Christopher Wentz, has not yet officially been released but I’ve had the chance to read it and keep up with progress through the O’Reilly Rough Cuts program. With its last update happening over a month ago, I anticipate that its now press ready and that a review of the book would be appropriate at this time.

Even though Atlas has not yet been officially released, this book is already a late comer to the market. It’s been beaten to market by a variety of AJAX texts that included some coverage of Atlas and at least one dedicated Atlas book from Apress. With all the press around Ajax and the huge Microsoft ASP.NET programmers market, putting out a book in the Atlas category is an opportunity that won’t be ignored by the major publishing houses. After trying out Atlas for a while during its Community Technology Preview (CTP) release and seeing the fairly extensive documentation and examples released by both Microsoft and the community, I tend to think that it’s an opportunity that they might best have chosen to ignore just the same.

Working through Christopher’s book, things appeared to be clustered into several sections. Although this is not officially the way the book is broken down, it makes the most sense from a reviewing standpoint:

• Introductory Chapters – Introduction to Atlas, AJAX, JavaScript, and client-side controls. This material takes up the first eight chapters (i.e. half) of the book and the information contained within can largely be garnered elsewhere including articles, books, and the Atlas documentation. If you’re not entirely new to AJAX, this section of materials is skimmable or skippable entirely.
• Server-Side Chapters – These chapters cover using server data, custom data sources, Web services, and cross-domain calls using a server proxy. This is by far the best original material in the book and is well worth a read.
• Atlas Implementation Chapters – This section covers the broadest array of topics. Some of it, such as extending controls and using Atlas with Web parts, is very interesting material. Other sections, such as Map mashups (using MapPoint, blah!), and the Atlas control toolkit (great tools, no value added above and beyond MS materials).
• “Other” Chapters – Certainly not what I bought the book for. Using Atlas with PHP, other AJAX tool coverage, although interesting, was put at the tail end of the book for a reason. This material could just have well been made into appendixes or omitted entirely.

All in all, Christopher’s writing style is good and he gives adequate coverage to the breadth of Atlas topics. This book might make for a good desk reference but is a tedious end-to-end read. Stick to the documentation or go for more pragmatic materials such as O’Reilly’s other offering in this area, Getting Started with Atlas, from their shortcuts series.

When I purchased this book almost 3 weeks ago, I was surprised to find that it had been on the shelves for 3 months already. Books that unify advanced architectural concepts such as Domain-Driven Design and design patterns are few and far between. This is especially true in the .NET world since many of the source materials originated in the Java realm.

Nilsson does a rather unique job of puling together some of the best domain-driven, object-oriented patterns and approaches and explain them using .NET-specific examples. The pros and cons, as I see them, are taken from my Amazon.com review and reprinted below:

Pros

• Combines the ideas of Domain Driven Design (Evans) with Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (Fowler). These books are pretty much mandatory reading prior to diving into this book.
• Draws upon a myriad of other well-known sources, including materials from Refactoring to Patterns and the GoF, work from Johnson and Lowy, as well as a rare reference to Naked Objects. The more experienced and better read you are, the more this stuff will make sense.
• Rare .NET coverage of advanced concepts like Plain Old CLR Objects (POCOs), persistence ignorant (PI) objects, O/R mapping with NHibernate, Dependency Injection, Inversion of Control, and Aspect-Oriented Programming.

Cons

• While some sections are really insightful and could contain more interesting materials, other sections seem to drone on too long. The work on defining the NUnit tests, in particular, flows like a stream of consciousness and doesn’t really add a lot of structured value to understanding DDD, patters, or TDD for that matter.
• Embedded comments in the text adopt from the style used in Framework Design Guidelines. It worked very well for Cwalina / Abrams in their book because it seemed planned in from the outset. Comments like “one reviewer commented on the code with the following, more succinct version” seem like editorial comments left in and not collaborative authoring by design.