Gojko Adzic

It has been a while since I published a book review on this web site. I have read a lot of books in the mean time, but none of them seemed worth to recommend. Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran not only captured my attention, it also captured my imagination.
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Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

The central theme of this book is how the IT industry resembles an asylum taken over by inmates - with software products completely missing the goals of their customers due to a combination of programmer psychology and sales-driven feature explosion. Alan Cooper argues that programmers drive the development process using their own image as a guideline, and overloading the software with features which require expert knowledge. On the other hand, sales and marketing push for features that can be used by beginners in order to expand the customer base. Most of the software users are, according to Cooper, ‘perpetual intermediaries’, so their needs are not addressed at all. Cooper advocates fighting back against this unnecessary complexity and refusing to give in to the mass craziness. His proposed solution is interaction design, a relatively new design practice focused on improving the way users access software. Continue Reading »

Death March, Second Edition by Edward Yourdon is an interesting study of high-risk software projects, which would normally be expected to fail - author defines a death march as a project for which an unbiased risk of failure is greater than 50%. Continue Reading »

Pragmatic Ajax: A Web 2.0 Primer, by Justin Gehtland, Bel Galbraith and Dion Almaer is a great introduction into the world of Web 2.0. In about 300 pages, this book covers most of the topics required to get started with Ajax-based development, from principles to debugging and integration with major server platforms. Continue Reading »

A surprisingly pragmatic book on managing software projects, The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun contains practical suggestions and clear-headed explanations without getting involved into methodologies or buzzword-compliant processes.
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