My "fluffy" reading list for 2015

In 2014 I was kind of reluctant to reading and the queue of my "to read" books has grown immensely. I could probably spend full time reading the books instead of my actual job - it still wouldn't help to clear up the queue. BTW, I keep track of my reading list at Goodreads, that's a nice website!

Why is it a "fluffy" reading list, you'd ask? Because none of the books here are technical. That's a part of my reasoning - if something is not technical, I call it "fluffy". It doesn't mean that it's a bad thing ;) So I though I'd share a few of the "fluffy" books that I'm planning to read next. Maybe someone would see that I'm planning to read a crappy book and can suggest something instead?

The book I'm currently reading is The Inmates are Running the Asylum Oh man! I wish I would have read the book 5 years ago when I just started to work at ZeroTurnaround! I could have saved so much time by now. This is a must read book for every product manager and software designer. Well written, highlights the issues with software from the usability POV.

Next on my list is Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers. The author shows that in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle there is a vast chasm between the early adopters and the early majority. The challenge is to narrow this chasm and ultimately accelerate adoption across every segment. I've heard good things about the book, so I think I should give it a try. Nice cover, btw :)

How Google Works. I don't even know what to expect. The title is kind of abstract and the potential reader could assume different content depending on how the title is interpreted.

How Google Works is the sum of those experiences distilled into a fun, easy-to-read primer on corporate culture, strategy, talent, decision-making, communication, innovation, and dealing with disruption.

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement was suggested to my by colleagues. One of the reviewers wrote about this book:

The best process improvement novel I've seen, this classic work explains the all-important Theory of Constraints through real life examples and a surprisingly good story. Most books of this nature are exceptionally unrealistic, but this one manages to keep the reader engaged, which is key for an instructional text like this.

The Connected Company. The title is intriguing :) And good reviews also. I think it's worth reading.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products is probably the last "fluffy" book on my immediate reading list. Again - suggested by colleagues. The title implies one very interesting topic for discussion "Why do some products capture widespread attention while others flop?"

GSOC2008: A Gift Book From Google

Received the book today - Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think.
Last year's book was Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project, which is also available online at http://producingoss.com.


It looks like I have a book collection now! :)

An Interesting Reference to Google.com

Yesterday my mother made me a Christmas gift - a book. This book is called "Stress as an Asymmetric State. Natural Healing". Nice hardcover, approximately 125 pages. But on the very first page, where all the copyrights are listed I found something very strange to my mind.

I found the following. At the line 4 of the copyright page there's a reference to www.google.com. It says:

All the illustrative material comes from www.google.com and is adopted for this book

Pardon me, but I doubt that any trustworthy author would refer to a search engine in his/her text. Say, if you make a student project at university, will you refer to {yahoo|altavista|google|yandex}.com to make your text look authoritative??? I don't think so. I can think that the authors did not even know about this reference, but the respectful publisher should have thought twice before passing this one to production.

Hibernate Books Review

Java Persistence with Hibernate


Java Persistence with Hibernate was a good reference to me, but the book tries to be everything for everybody and this is what makes it a little hard to read. The book covers all the aspects of Hibernate framework in detail, starting from the ORM fundamentals up to conversational processing which is not found in any other Hibernate-related books.


Hibernate Quickly


As the name says, Hibernate Quickly is best suited as the introductory reference to Hibernate. The books follows the problem-solution pattern: at the beginning of each chapter, a bullet list of the topics is followed by the goals which a targeted by this chapter. This is what makes the book well-structured and easy to follow. I found a lot of easy to understand examples accompanied with good text explanations in this book and I think it is the best way to lean something new - by examples.

Book Review: Design Recipes for FPGAs

Design Recipes for FPGAs is a sort of "something about everything" book. The book just lists the FPGA-related issues and doesn't cover any of those in detail. Even if there are some kind of examples - I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone. Istead, The Design Warrior's Guide to FPGAs is a much better alternative.

Book Review: The Design Warrior's Guide to FPGAs

The Design Warrior's Guide to FPGAs is a must-read book! Written in an entertaining style, the books is very interesting to read. The book provides an insightful overview of the FPGA technology, design tools and flows. This is a great book for someone that is getting started in FPGAs. After reading this book one will have the basic knowledge about FPGA technology.

Book Review: Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0

Another book about EJB 3.0 is Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0. The book focuses on the changes made since EJB 2.1. Here are some week aspects of this book:

• it is not that smoothly readable as the previous EJB book


• the book spends too much on high-level introduction of EJB 3.0 specification while it could dive into more practical details ASAP


• JPA is poorly covered

But nevertheless, the book is somewhat a good complementary material for learning EJB 3.0.

Book Review: EJB 3 in Action

EJB 3 in Action was really enjoyable to read. This is a well-structured book and covers just what is really required for Java 5 EE application development. In my opinion it is not the best suited for a beginner: it is easier to understand the text if one already has some experience with EJB 2.0. The book provides practical code examples, best practices, design patterns, and performance tuning tips.
I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who would like to get familiar with EJB 3.0.

P.S. The relevance to the JEE development is out of the scope here :) Personally, I would rather go Spring/Hibernate than JSR220 and JSR291 rather than JSR277.

P.S.2 Why not to assume that Hibernate and Spring are the de jure standards for JEE middleware development, instead of creating EJB 3.0? Political reasons? I think that Sun is still reinventing the wheel with its own "standards" and not making use of the community process.