The Wit and Ramblings of David Giard - Books
Demanding rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty

You could start at the beginning and read all the way through Windows Server 2008 R2 Administration Instant Reference by Matt Hester and Chris Henley. Part 1 of the book of the book ("Getting Started") walks the reader through planning, installing and upgrading the operating system, while subsequent sections dive into details about specific areas of the software.

But a more reasonable approach is to open to the section on which you are working today. Each chapter is structured so that you can dig into the detail you need. Each topic begins with an explanation of concepts and definitions of key terms. This part is critical for someone like me, who doesn't spend his days managing servers. Experienced administrators may skip this section and jump to the detailed explanations of how to use and configure each feature of Windows Server 2008 R2. Basic functionality is described first, followed by more advanced features.

A section on Active Directory, for example, begins with a description of built-in groups, followed by a description of custom users and groups and how rights are granted. After establishing these basics, the author describes how to use Active Directory to manage groups, users and rights and how to configure this in Windows Server.

Hester and Henley write in a clear, concise style that simplifies everything they describe. Step-by-step instructions are amplified by screen shots.

The smaller dimensions of the book make it fit easily into a laptop bag, despite the 500+ pages of text.

This is a solid book for a full- or part-time network administrator to keep on hand for a quick reference or for a more detailed look into important concepts of Windows Server.

Official Book site

Complexity is the Enemy! 

This is the message driven home repeatedly by Roger Sessions in his book Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises. 

Sessions recommends tackling a complex enterprise architecture by identifying the subcomponents of a complex system and dividing that system into autonomous subsystems. He refers to these subsystems as Autonomous Business Capabilities (ABCs) and the process of dividing them as a Simple Iterative Process (SIP).  

Before describing how to approach this process, Sessions presents a mathematical proof that subdividing a complex system into a set of subsystems reduces the complexity of the system as a whole. This seems intuitive to many of us, but the mathematics allow us to be more forceful in our commitment to this process. The mathematics is relatively simple (nothing beyond high school math) and he even recommends training team members in this mathematics before beginning any SIP.

A large part of an Enterprise Architect's job is to define the optimal way to partition the complex system. By applying mathematics to his model, he removes the emotions that so often dictate how a project is broken up.

The process of splitting a complex system into appropriate subsystem isn't overwhelming, but it is critical to managing complexity. According to Sessions, Each ABC should contain only elements that relate to one another; and the elements of one ABC should not relate directly to or communicate directly with any element in another ABC. Once partitioned, each ABC should be roughly the same size, although it is possible to split a subsystem further into sub-subsystems. It is also critical that communication between each subsystem take place only at a few clearly-defined points.

If this sounds like a recipe for Service Oriented Architecture, this is no coincidence. Sessions concludes his book with recommendations on moving from business partitions (ABCs) to software partitions, which he describes as "fortresses". These software partitions follow many of the same rules as ABCs created with the SIP, so making this transition is straightforward.

This is a good book for anyone who aspires to be an Architect (Enterprise or otherwise) and wants to apply a systematic approach to managing complexity.

Microsoft ASP.Net MVC (aka "MVC") is a new framework from Microsoft designed to encourage loose coupling between the user interface and the data layer of a web application. With MVC, an application is logically divided into the Model (the data), the View (the user interface) and the Controller (code to retrieve and manipulate data before passing it to the View). This framework makes it nearly impossible to add business logic (or any code for that matter) to the UI layer; Business logic in an MVC application belongs in either the Model or the Controller. MVC allows for greater separation of concerns, more control over the HTML output and easier unit testing of a greater percentage of your code.

Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 by Rob Conery, Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack and Scott Guthrie describes the framework, how to use it, and how to exploit these advantages.

A significant part (about 40% of the text) of this book can be downloaded free. Chapter 1 - the free download written by Microsoft VP and cyber-celebrity Scott Guthrie - describes an ASP.NET MVC application called 'Nerd Dinner'.  This is the chapter I spent the most time on. I used Nerd Dinner as a model to build my own MVC application, striving to understand why the code was written as it was and how the framework was used. For me, this was the most useful part of the book.

This is not to say that the rest of the book is useless - It was very informative. I especially liked the chapters that dove deeper into explaining the Routing Engine, the Controllers and the Views. These chapters weren't comprehensive enough to be a definitive reference, but they were clear and concisse and I learned the flexibility of this framework and alternative ways to use it.

Other chapters describe how to use JQuery and Ajax to make MVC applications more dynamic and visually appealing. The authors devoted two chapters to testing because this is one of the major benefits of MVC.

The final chapter describes how to integrate MVC and the traditional web forms framework into a single application. I appreciated this because so much of my work is modifying existing systems.

My recommendation is to download and read the free chapter of this book before deciding whether to invest the 50 bucks on the larger dead tree version. This will give you a better perspective on the framework and you will make the rest of the book more relevant. If your goal is simply to evaluate this framework or get exposure to it, this chapter may be sufficient.

But if your interest is piqued by Nerd Dinner, the remainder of this book is a good start in learning MVC.

Think big; act small; fail fast; learn rapidly.

These are some of the lessons from Tom and Mary Poppendieck’s book Lean Software Development – An Agile Toolkit.

The Poppendiecks take what they learned from Lean Manufacturing (many of which were originated with the pioneering work of Toyota Motor Company) and apply these lessons to software development.

They deliver advice in the form of 22 “tools” that can make a team or project more lean. Related tools are grouped together into chapters.

The authors recommend that organizations define, find and eliminate waste wherever it occurs in a process. Examples of waste in software development include defects, waiting, extra features or processes, and any non-essential activity. To assist finding waste, they recommend Value Stream Mapping - a technique in which one lists in sequences all the steps from customer request to delivery and estimates the time to completion of each step and the wait time between each step. This technique often makes bottlenecks obvious so that they can be reduced or eliminated.

Many of the tools in this book overlap. For example, iterations and feedback are listed as separate tools, but shorter iterations allow for more frequent feedback to the development team. Short iterations also expose design problems more quickly sot that the can be corrected early in the development cycle at a lower cost.

Much of the authors’ advice seems counter-intuitive. For example, they recommend against detailed planning at the start of a project and attempting to optimize every part of a multi-part project.

A popular approach among software project managers is to create in advance a detailed plan of every step in the design, development and deployment process and to estimate each step. To do so, you need to know a specific scope of everything you will build. This makes sense as a risk-reduction strategy, until you consider that environments, requirements, priorities and people often change while software is being developed. A rigid plan created up front often requires an aggressive change control process to alter that plan in any way. And for long-term projects, the changing landscape almost always forces changes to the design. Also, when users know they will only get one chance to request features, they tend to ask for far more, so scope tends to get bloated when projects are planned in this way. A better approach is to re-evaluate priorities periodically throughout the development process and keep focused on the top priority features that have not yet been implemented.

Complex project can and often should be split into a number of smaller phases or tasks. This helps to simplify the complexity. Many managers then strive to optimize each phase of the project, assuming that this goal will lead to overall optimization of the project. The Poppendiecks advise against this goal because optimizing some phases may cause a bottleneck in your overall project, thus slowing down the project as a whole. A buildup of code waiting to be tested, for example, represents waste that should be eliminated. It is best to look at the system as a whole when setting optimization goals. Optimizing each part ignores the interaction between these parts.

The book finishes with practical advice to get started making your team and process more lean.

Lean Software Development - An Agile Toolkit is a clearly-written, thoughtful book and anyone involved in software development projects can benefit from reading it.

Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think is a great book, not only for what it contains, but for what it does not contain.

At a couple hundred pages (most of which are filled with large graphics), Krug is forced to be concise in order to deliver his message. There is no room for irrelevant data in so little text. Happily for the reader, he succeeds brilliantly.

“Don’t Make Me Think” is not just the title of this book - It is the single most important point Krug makes about web usability design.

Throughout the book, he emphasizes that a good user interface should be self-evident. A user seeing a web page for the first time should not have to wonder what the page is for or how to use it.

He provides many examples to illustrate his points – most from actual web sites. Krug holds up Amazon.com as an example of a site that is doing many things right, making itself intuitive for the users. It’s tough to argue this point, given Amazon’s success and enormous growth over the years.

According to Krug, most web designers make the mistake of assuming that visitors to their site will read everything on each page presented to them. The reality is that most visitors quickly scan a page, searching for anything that looks relevant to them. When they find something that seems useful and clickable, they click it. When they actually find something useful, they stop looking.

Because of this behavior, web designers should focus on simplifying their page layout and draw the reader’s eye to the most important parts of the page that support the most common activities. They should provide clear, self-evident labels for the items on their pages: there should be no confusion what each item is for and what will happen if a user clicks on it or otherwise interacts with it.

But following his design advice is not sufficient. Krug also recommends recruiting and observing testers to use your web design. Watch how they interact with the pages; note the pages that they struggle to learn; document unexpected behavior.  A designer does not always think like an end user and users often react in unexpected ways. This type of testing is a good way to learn how end users perceive and interact with your site.

Check out this book if you want a quick way to improve the usability of your web sites.

Cliff Atkinson's Beyond Bullet Points proposes a radically new approach to creating presentations based on Microsoft Power Point.

Atkinson provides a template (available for download); an outline that splits a presentation into lengths of 5, 15 and 45 minutes; and an abundance of advice on improving your presentations.

After reading the book, I discarded the template and the outline but I embraced many of his ideas.

Here is some of the book's best advice:

Allow your presentation to tell a story.
The first presentation I did after reading this book included a story about consultants Juan and Amal, who had nearly identical skills and accomplishments but received very different performance reviews. Most of my presentations are instructions on how to use software, which doesn't lend itself well to a story format. If possible, however, I try to weave a story into the presentation.

Minimize the text in your slides.
Atkinson recommends eliminating all bullet points from every slide. The only text on each slide should be a headline. I haven't gone that far, but I have drastically reduced the amount of text on each slide. When I open an existing deck, I move much of the slide text into the Notes section. This simplifies the presentation, but keeps the text with the slides when I distribute them to users. During presentation, I make the former bullet points part of my verbal presentation, rather than something the audience reads off the screen. This keeps the audience's focus on me, rather than on the screen.

Use simple graphics
A simple graphic communicates an idea visually. I have been replacing the bullet points in my slides with a headline and a single photograph that relates to the slide topic. The slides become more interesting but less distracting.

Rehearse your talk
I already knew this but the book's reinforcement helped remind me how important it is to be familiar with one's material. Nothing achieves this goal like a couple dry runs through your presentation. Ideally this should be in front of other people (to provide feedback) and in a room similar to the one in which you will be presenting; however, filming your presentation and reviewing it yourself is also very helpful.

I have not bought entirely into the Beyond Bullet Points approach. But I have internalized many of the ideas in this book and my presentations have improved as a result.

Link: Beyond Bullet Points Online

Lynnne Truss is a stickler - a stickler for proper punctuation. 

I don't know if she wanders the streets with a marker to add missing apostrophes - such as on posters for the movie Two Weeks Notice; or with white stickers to conceal extraneous punctuation - such as in a store signs that read "Boat Motor's", but I know that she is tempted to do so. I know that it pains her to see such misuse of common punctuation in public places. She agonizes each time she sees "its" and "it's" misused.

She put together "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" - a small volume designed to clarify the proper usage of punctuation in the English language and to pursuade us that it is important. 

Like Ms. Truss, I agree on the importance of punctuation, particularly in public or professional communication; but I don't always know the correct rules, so her advice is useful.

The book devotes a full chapter to the use and abuse of the apostrophe; another to the comma; a third to the dash; and so on. For each punctuation mark in question, Ms. Truss lists the proper usages of that punctuation and some common, and annoying, violations of those rules.  For example, her book lists 17 distinct uses for the comma.

It’s a difficult task because punctuation rules are sometimes vague and open to interpretation; and because the rules are often broken by respected writers; and because the rules change in a living language like English. 

But Truss does her best to clarify the vagaries and to evangelize the static, unambiguous rules. It's important because the meaning of a sentence can change dramatically, depending on the punctuation: "Extra-marital sex" does not mean the same as "Extra marital sex";

The poor punctuation of "Eats, Shoots & leaves" (the title; not the book) misrepresents the characteristics of a panda. An extraneous comma suggests that a panda employs firearms after its meal and before its exit. Correctly punctuated ("Eats shoots and leaves"), the phrase describes a panda's favorite meal.

Most of Ms. Truss's advice does not sound like a textbook. Regarding comma usage, for example, she dictates the rule: "Don't use commas like a stupid person". What she means is that one should step back and read a sentence to verify that the punctuation conveys the correct meaning. 
For example, the sentence
"Leonora walked on her head, a little higher than usual."
is grammatically correct, but probably not what the author intended.

Despite her passion for the topic, her style is light and engaging. I laughed out loud several times while reading this short volume. She parenthetically refers to Gertrude Stein as a "strange woman" (presumably because she disagrees with nearly every opinion Ms. Stein holds on punctuation); and she once described a long, over-punctuated sentence as exhaustedly slipping into a comma.

I really enjoyed this book and will keep it on my bookshelf beside Strunk and White's excellent The Elements of Style because it is concise, accessible and extremely useful.

Edward Tufte has spent a lifetime turning data into pictures and studying the best way to do so.

In his first (self-published) book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, he describes what makes an excellent graph or map. 

Not all data sets are good candidates for charts.  For small data sets with exact values, Tufte recommends using tables.  However to compare values or present many pieces of data simultaneously, a graph is far superior.  Graphs, Tufte asserts, are most useful when showing complex data and displaying trends or observations that are not immediately obvious when the data is displayed in tabular form.  An excellent graph is one that is clear, precise and efficient - that is it "gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space."

Tufte provides some advice to accomplish this graphical excellence.  He introduces the concept of "Data-Ink" ratio.  This is the amount of information conveyed by a chart, relative to the amount of ink required to print that chart.  Generally, a graph can be improved by increasing its Data-Ink Ratio.  This can be accomplished by erasing non-data ink, such as unnecessary gridlines and labels; by erasing redundant data; and by labeling data directly, rather than forcing users to look up information in a legend.

Related to the Data-Ink ratio is his push for high data density - graphics that have maximum data per page, maximum data per square inch, and maximum data per amount of ink used.  As long as a graphic does not appear confusing, cluttered or overwhelming, you should pack as much information as you can into it.

Tufte warns against "chartjunk", his term for irrelevant text, lines, pictures or other decorations that contain no actual information.  This is ink that can be erased from a chart without reducing the amount of information in the chart.  Many graphs contain pictures, 3D effects and colors that don’t relate to the data.  Rather than enhancing the user’s understanding of the data, this “junk” distracts the user’s attention from the data, making the graph harder to understand.  Erasing chartjunk increases the Data-Ink ratio, which should be the goal of every designer of data graphics.

I appreciate that the book provides numerous examples of both the right way and the wrong way to represent data visually and that most of these examples came from real-world publication.  Tufte pulls no punches in his criticism of those who do things the wrong way.  In describing one graph published in American Education magazine - a confusing 3D graph that shows only 5 pieces of data and uses 5 different colors that in no way relate to that data - he writes "This may well be the worst graphic ever to find its way into print."

This is an excellent book for anyone who needs to present data to an audience.  Business analysts, managers and software developers can all increase their effectiveness by implementing Tufte’s ideas.

Links:
EdwardTufte.com
This book on Amazon