The price was right: AUD$19.95. I’ll keep this beside me when I’m Ruby-ing, it’s a useful memory-jogger to have.

<aside>
I confess: I’m still trying to discover Ruby’s “inner beauty.” As a colleague says: in comparison with PHP or PERL, Ruby is a step forward. Apologies to any Ruby fanboy reading this, but It’s got a lot of walking to do still, as far as I can see. This is Java, circa 1999…green threads, pissy networking, incomplete (and sometimes just plain wrong) class library, weird little GUI packages: the lot. Been there, done that!
</aside>

Mostly skimmed, rather than read, to be truthful…it’s that sort of book: good to keep around for when you’ll need it but not really a “fun read” (unless your soul has a special place for Version Control Systems).

I was inspired to know more after posting Productivity With Grails And Git, and so I had to find out more.

Git looks worthy, and the book is a worthy exposition of Git’s capabilities.

“In this truly unique technical book…” you will get a collection of homilies and platitudes about life as a software architect. Some will be useful and thought-provoking, some…not so much. It is an interesting read, regardless. It’s just the sort of book to have at hand while waiting for a bus, or to keep the eyes/brain engaged during a 10-minute lull before the next storm rolls into your life.

As for the price…now that I have read it, and understand more clearly that the production costs were essentially zero, I feel ripped off! After all:

…This book is probably completely different from any other book you’ve read. It is the combined work of more than four dozen authors, all of whom donated their thoughts and advice about software architecture without compensation.

Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed the book well enough, but the sticker shock…hmmm :-(

Gotta admire Richard Monson-Haefel for finding a new, painless way to get into print!

There’s a follow-up website; wish I’d found it before shelling out hard-earned (and increasingly rare) $ on the book!

This topic is not really my “sort of thing” (I generally find that these books quickly devolve into platitudes and neat little homilies). Nonetheless, I did enjoy reading it.

I found the discussion on the Dreyfuss model and Nursing, and the relevance to the software profession interesting. These paragraphs in particular resonated:

Given that the highest-skilled developers are orders of magnitude more productive than the least-skilled developers, the current common salary structures for developers is simply inadequate. Like the nursing profession years ago, we continually face the risk of losing a critical mass of expertise to management, competitors or other fields.

This tendency is made worse by the recent increases in outsourcing and offshoring development to cheaper countries. It’s an unfortunate development in that it further cements the idea in people’s minds that coding is just a mechanical activity and can be sent away to the lowest bidder. It doesn’t quite work that way, of course.

As in the nursing profession, experts at coding must continue to code and find a meaningful and rewarding career there. Setting a pay scale and a career ladder that reflects a top coder’s value to the organization is the first step toward making this a reality.

I don’t know if this really reflects the main thrust of the book, but it was interesting to read.

And I thought I was a master of ranting! Compared to these guys, I am nothing! Nothing, I tell you!

There’s actually some truth in the message here. There is a lot of thought-provoking material (the “XP From the Trenches” stuff tends to be quite interesting), and the book really does bear reading.

Getting to the end was hard though, not because I disagree with the what the authors are saying, but the way they say it rather destroys their credibility.

Shorts rants can be effective, but a book-sized rant is wearisome.

The authors come across as having massive chips on their shoulders…their dislike for pair programming seems boundless, and their disdain for XP’s prediliction for “oral documention”…well:

(snapshot taken from amazon.com’s “look inside” book review feature)

It’s not often that one finds the phrase “What a load of crap!” in a technical book. Sadly.

I hope that the royalties from my purchase can gainfully contribute to the authors’ pharmaceutical needs. Or rehab. Whichever is most beneficial.

Actually good, useful, serious stuff.

I wonder if trainee Gen-Y Brain Surgeons use comics? “Hey dudes, don’t cut through the white stuff, m’kay?”

[edit]
…and then there’s Google’s 40-page comics interpretation of key engineering decisions.

Useful grist for the mill…

I’m working my way (dipping into each as the mood takes me, so in no particular order) through these guys:

Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum
Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams
Agile Estimating and Planning

The thing that all these have in common is that they give you the feeling that the authors have “been there, man.”

They also have a feeling of optimism: “the solution is in here, just look harder.”

I like this feeling!

I have to disable my cynicism chip, but that’s probably all to the good ;-)

On the bad side, they make me feel like I have wasted a career :-(

It’s not that I want to be a Project Manager, heavens no!

it’s just that I want to work with a project management team that has read and understood the messages here. <sigh emphasis=’heavy’ />

Like that’s going to happen anytime soon!

Here in Brisbane (Queensland, Australia; not the one in California), Prince2 is going great guns in Government circles (which is practially all that there is around here…). As I said before: there seems to be a ’spirit of “hey it’s not working, let’s throw more X at it”‘

The Art of Agile Development by James Shore and Shane Warden.

Excellent content presented very clearly. This is the book to show a worried team or sceptical manager.

Hmmm…it’s actually a bit thick for your average PHB. Not too many pictures either, come to think of it :-)

One of my colleagues recently asked for the ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance‘ for the Project and Program Management space.

This is it, IMHO.

In the words of one reviewer on Amazon:

Finally somebody put together a book with the sharpest insights that you find…

Another reviewer finished up with:

Buy the book, read it, use it to implement agile practices and return to it frequently.

Say no more, guv. Say no more.