You will have definitely heard of at least one of these books, unless you’re a complete neanderthal. You’ll notice my list has lots of kid books on it. That is because these books have all shaped me as a person at important times in my life, and as a result I’ve never forgotten them. Or maybe I’ve just never grown up.

The Great Brain by John D Fitzgerald: Being wicked smart is wicked fun. This was a good message at a time when being smart was getting me beat up a lot. 2007 was a bad year.

What about you? Feel free to recommend a book that has influenced you.

There are a few really cool things about this issue. First, we launched it as a paper magazine at CAST, AST’s annual conference. It was really cool to do that, and it sparked a lot of interest in potential authors and advertisers. If you, like the CAST attendees, are interested in either, shoot me an email at dave@techdarkside.com.

Another really cool aspect of this issue is an article I compiled from a controversial email discussion I started about common myths of software testing. The debate got so hot and acrimonious that at least one person left AST over it! Naturally, this left plenty of good stuff for me to publish, and you’ll like the graphical theme I applied to the piece.

I’m pretty much allergic to any form of requirements documentation. Change control makes my skin itch, and big up front planning makes me vomit. But I also am not totally comfortable with winging it all the time. As a project manager, I need to get a sense of how big the project is, what are the pieces and parts, and how will the product be used. And I need it fast, flexible, and without much overhead. Oh yeah, don’t forget I have to also be able to use it to plan iterations, drive development and testing, and report status. All without making comprehensive documentation more important than working software or processes and tools more important than individuals and interactions.

That’s why I’m glad I discovered User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development by Mike Cohn. It is a short, practical explanation of how to plan, estimate, and execute an agile project with user stories. These lightweight requirements never get in the way or replace conversations with users and customers. Instead, they help you keep track of what you’re going to build and serve as a reminder to talk to SME’s about what they mean. You can use them to report status, to plan iterations, and to get an overview of the product’s feature set.

I wholeheartedly endorse this book for all project managers.

Today is my 35th birthday. It doesn’t feel particularly old to me, but it does feel like a milestone. It feels like I was supposed to have done something with myself by this age, that I should be more than just a tiny little cog in a gigantic, complex machine. I think it’s natural to feel this way at some point in your life. For some people it may be thirty, forty, or fifty. For me, it’s thirty-five.

This feeling intensified when I recently listened to the audio version of Randy Pausch’s epic book, “The Last Lecture.” A computer science professor dying of pancreatic cancer, Randy gave a “last lecture” for Carnegie Mellon University that went on to become a YouTube hit and will undoubtedly be a best-selling book, if it isn’t already.

One of the themes of Randy’s book is dreams coming true. He talks about the dreams he had as a young boy, and how some of them happened and some of them did not. It was a very emotional section for me – I can’t really remember what I dreamed of growing up to be when I was six years old. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t to be an IT project manager in a corporation with revenues higher than the GDP of some third-world countries. I finished the book with the distinct feeling that I needed to find a way to make my professional life mean more, to myself, and to the IT community at large.

The Last Lecture is a book that will make you think about what you want most out of life – your job, your family, your marriage. It will make you wonder what you would choose to spend your time on if you were told you only had six months to live. Would you ever show up at work again? What would you tell your family? How would you create their last memories of you? What childhood dreams would suddenly come bubbling to the top of your priority list after having been ignored since your age first became double digits?

It’s impossible to read this book and not ask these questions. It is simultaneously heart-breaking and heart-warming, and forces a re-evaluation of everything you ever thought was important. For me, it sharpened my desire to do more with my professional life, so that when I turn forty-five I will be able to look back on the third of my adult life I have spent working and not feel like I should have done something else entirely.

Read or listen to Randy’s book. Or just watch his lecture on youtube.

Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management by Johanna Rothman is the best project management reference I’ve ever read, and I’ve seen my share of project management tomes. Here’s what I like best about the book: it’s not theological. By this I mean Rothman doesn’t advocate one “true” way of running projects. She is very careful to be continually cognizant of context when she talks about different approaches you might take. In this sense, she is very situational about prescribing solutions, which I like because it helps a project manager develop what I think is a critical attribute of a good project manager: good judgment.

One of my favorite chapters is Recognizing and Avoiding Schedule Games, which uses comic art and prose to explain and fix schedule games that can occur on projects. Here are a few from the book:

and so on, for a total of 16 entertaining schedule games that every project manager eventually needs to face.

Rothman is an entertaining writer with a knack for interesting prose and practical advice. Unlike most PM books I’ve read, I’ve not found anything yet where I was inclined to ignore her advice or felt an approach would require too much work and yield too little benefit. She definitely has a propensity toward simple, sustainable approaches to project management, something I sincerely appreciate due to my strong disdain for any approach with substantial overhead.

Another great feature of this book is you can read it out of order, either by opening it randomly or by simply reading the sections that interest you at the moment or that apply to problems you are struggling with.

Buy it. Try it. It’s worth it.

I’ve been wanting to test the self-publishing waters for a long time, but I’ve been a little hesitant to do so, particularly with something like my novel, Genesis 2.0. I’m not at the point where I’m willing to experiment with something I’ve invested so much time in (yet). At the very least, I wouldn’t want my novel to be my very first foray into the realm of self-publishing.

So, I’ve decided to try it with a short story I’ve written called Alter Ego. It is an Information Technology murder mystery with a twist that will disturb you. You can read the opening pages, look at the cover, and even buy a copy (paper or electronic) at Lulu.com.

Now, about the Lulu.com publishing process. I chose Lulu because of their fee structure. Unlike iUniverse or some of the other self-publishing companies, Lulu doesn’t charge any upfront fees if you don’t want special services, like an ISBN or distribution through Amazon.com and other retailers. They are able to do this using print on demand (POD) technology – they won’t make a single copy of my book until someone decides to purchase it.

For my experiment, I decided to go with the most basic format I could, just to get used to it. If I sell twenty copies, then I’ll upgrade my project to include some of Lulu’s other services.

It was surprisingly easy to self-publish with Lulu.com, but you have to be prepared to do book layout. Fortunately for me, that is pretty easy with my iMac – it took me about twenty minutes to get my story set up in pages to print as a 6×9 paperback. You don’t have to be an expert – all you really need to be able to do is take a similar book off your shelf (in my case I used an old Dragon Lance novel) and copy it’s format. Then, you upload your document to Lulu and it is converted to a printable PDF.

Next you create your cover, using Lulu’s art or your own. I chose to use Lulu’s art for my cover because I’m simply not very artistic. I’d like a more interesting cover, so if any of you read Alter Ego and have good ideas, please let me know. It was really pretty easy to do.

Once your book is ready, the last step is to decide how much money you want to make off each copy. That’s right. You set your own margin. Lulu.com tells you how much the production cost of each book is, and you decide how much you want to make.

My first copy will arrive at my house early this week. I’m very eager to see the quality of the binding. Lulu offers a variety of binding options, including perfect binding, saddle stitched, and coil. Unfortunately, Alter Ego is so short that I had to go with saddle stitched. I would have preferred perfect binding, like thicker paperbacks, but… I’ll just have to try that option out next time.

Please feel free to post comments about Lulu.com or Alter Ego here if you like.

So, when this book arrived at my home I was careful about leaving it around. I didn’t want to have to explain what an “asshole” was to my kids, or why dad was reading a book about them. My wife gave it a funny, skeptical look when I pulled it out one evening and started reading it after the kids had gone to bed. I felt like maybe I should wrap it in a brown paper cover…

That said, I’m glad I bought this book. Yes, it could have been the “no jerk” rule, but who cares? Perhaps Robert Sutton is right when he says that “censored and watered-down variations like “the no jerk rule” or the “no bully rule” simply didn’t have the same ring of authenticity or emotional appeal.” At any rate, the point is well made – it’s okay to have one. It’s not okay to be one.

The book is extremely well-written and entertaining. Dr. Sutton uses true examples from the corporate world to illustrate his points in memorable ways and he cites research (without becoming boring) to help illustrate how damaging jerks at work can be. He also talks about strategies for keeping jerks out of your environment, getting rid of the ones you already have, and dealing with the ones you get rid of in healthy ways.

Everybody is an A-hole some of the time. Sutton differentiates between “temporary A-holes” and those who consistently exhibit mean-spirited behavior. The book includes a test you can use to help you figure out if you are an A-hole – one of the questions you will inevitably have as you read this book. I haven’t taken it yet – I’m thinking of writing it up and handing it out to some of my colleagues and letting them evaluate me with it, kind of a 360 degree A-hole evaluation.

So, what to do if you are consistently an A-hole? Get help. This book isn’t that thick.

The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t should be required reading for corporate IT.

Sigh. It’s been about 20 years since then. For the past 20 years, I’ve felt the same way about the Mac. It’s always cool looking, always easy to use, but I’ve never bought one. I loved the blueberry iMac. I coveted a colleague’s shiny white iBook. I envied the iPods that my teenage neighbors were never far from.

But did I buy one? Heck no. I’m an IT professional, for crying out loud. We don’t use Apple computers. They’re for amateurs, people who don’t understand computers and could never, ever, fathom the importance of using the command line. And so I’ve bought a long series of crappy Windows machines, cycling through one far-less-cool-than-an-Apple PC after another. I didn’t let the Blue Screen of Death stop me, nor did I abandon ship with the Windows Millenium Edition disaster (the biggest “Y2K” fiasco ever!). Why? Because I didn’t believe an Apple could meet my needs. Not that I’d ever tried one out for more than a few minutes of clicking pointlessly with my third right finger and wondering why a menu didn’t appear (“I’m right-clicking, why doesn’t this work?” I would say).

But today, I’m coming out of the closet. I won’t hide my secret longings for a computer that actually works and never crashes any more. It’s time to let the world know: I am now a Mac user. Or at least I will be, when my new 20″ iMac arrives from Amazon.com.

Review coming soon.

I got absolutely nothing out of this book, and I doubt anyone else will either unless they have very little experience interviewing. It might be a good book for high school graduates, or socially backward college graduates, but anyone who’s had more than three job interviews will find it lacks insight and is terribly boring.

I had to force myself to read the whole thing, which is pretty sad since it’s a very short book. The only thing that kept me going was the thought that I can’t review it in good faith if I haven’t read the whole thing!

Anybody have a recommendation for a GOOD book about interviewing? I’d love to have one.

There is one really remarkable quality of this book: Christopher Paolini wrote Eragon when he was just fifteen years old. He and his parents self-published it and promoted it themselves until it was picked up by a major publisher. Now it is a best-selling series and is being turned into a film.

Eragon is an entertaining tale, as is Eldest. Both books are easy to read, and the main characters are likeable and engaging. Unfortunately, the plot develops slowly and has similarities to Star Wars that are hard to ignore. The language is sometimes overly flowery to the point it becomes annoying and the actions of the characters sometimes don’t make any sense, at least not to me. There were a couple of times when I just couldn’t understand why Eragon and his comrades do what they do, because there seemed to be simpler solutions to their problems that they completely ignore.

That said, all of these faults are easy to forgive and don’t really detract much from the entertainment value. The Inheritance trilogy will never be The Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter, but it is still good reading. When the third installment makes it to the bookstore, I’ll be one of the millions of people to read it.