Gojko Adzic

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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Straight from the cover, it’s clear that this is not a usual “software book”. The Best Software Writing I is a collection of weblog posts from 2004, hand picked by Joel Spolsky. This book is a true mirror of the blogging community, displaying all the variety of Web – articles range from three picture comics to 15 page essays, comming straight from the minds of programming celebrities like Ken Arnold, Bruce Eckel and Ron Jeffries, but also people of whom you probably never heard and some who even remained anonymous. With such mix-and-match combination this book covers typical software topics like coding style, usability and overtime, but also lessons learned from project failures, appraisals of great hackers, transaction management strategies in coffee shops and software autism. Continue Reading »

Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions by Gary Klein is a very interesting study of the crisis decision making process. Klein and his team have “slept in fire stations, observed intensive care units, and ridden in M-1 tanks, U.S. Navy AEGIS cruisers, Blackhawk helicopters and AWACS aircraft”. From that experience, author disputes the traditional, rational choice paradigm and presents his own model of judgement, based on pattern recognition.

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