Exploring Extreme Programming
Game Design – Theory & Practice (2/e), Richard Rouse III. Wordware, 2005. This book is a somewhat sprawling look at game design. Its focus is on electronic games. It covers “what players want,” gameplay, artificial intelligence, story-telling, and game documentation Continue reading Review – Game Design
Refactoring to Patterns, Joshua Kerievsky. Addison-Wesley, 2005. Design patterns and refactoring have been related for a long time. (Consider that Ralph Johnson, one of the co-authors of Design Patterns, was a sponsor of the work that created the original refactoring Continue reading Review – Refactoring to Patterns
Lean Solutions, James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones. Free Press, 2005. These are the authors of The Machine that Changed the World. (The “machine” was lean production.) In this book, they expand on the idea of “lean consumption.” Their Continue reading Review – Lean Solutions
Design Rules, Volume 1: The Power of Modularity, Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark. MIT Press, 2000. Modularity creates value both at the level of systems and at the level of organizations. Baldwin and Clark describe a number of Continue reading Review – Design Rules, Vol. 1: The Power of Modularity
Requirements by Collaboration, Ellen Gottesdiener. ISBN 0-201-78606-0. Addison-Wesley, 2002. Workshops are an effective place to capture requirements – getting the right people in the room, working together well, they can reach important agreements about what is needed. This book focuses Continue reading Review – Requirements by Collaboration
Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed. Barry Boehm and Richard Turner. Addison-Wesley, 2004. Overall, this is a balanced treatment “agile” and “plan-driven” methods. (My biggest complaint is the title; if it had been “Balancing Agility and Planning” Continue reading Review – Balancing Agility and Discipline
Managing Agile Projects, Sanjiv Augustine. Addison-Wesley, 2005. Sanjiv answers the question, “What do managers do on an agile team?” to say that they have many functions: team building, alignment, adaptation, and more. I particularly appreciated the chapter on using a Continue reading Review – Managing Agile Projects
Funny Noises for the Connoisseur, by Bart Hopkin with Ray Brunelle and Vincent Nicastro. Experimental Music Inc., 2003. ISBN 0-9727313-1-8. Book and CD. In 60 pages, the authors explore a bunch of ways to make some very odd sounds. There Continue reading Review – Funny Noises for the Connoisseur
The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage. Berkley Press, 1998. A history of the telegraph, from its creation on. The author relates the initial optimism about the telegraph to the similar hype about the Internet – as a tool for bringing about Continue reading Review – The Victorian Internet
Creative Training Techniques Handbook, Robert W. Pike, Human Resource Development Press, 2003. This is a wide-ranging book on training. It reads like a brain-dump, with lots of nuggets from an experienced trainer. (That’s both an advantage and a disadvantage.) I Continue reading Review – Creative Training Techniques Handbook