Category: Books

My interview with Lance Loveday of Closed-Loop Marketing

Amazon’s fufillment system is mind-bogglingly good. So good, I only notice it when buying elsewhere.

“The only way to grow your business long-term is through this process of turning your customers into your sales force.”
- Fred Reichheld

Two thumbs up for the Amazon Kindle. Excellent UI.

If you’re a retailer running a home-grown e-commerce stack, your engineers will enjoy and benefit from Cal Henderson’s “Building Scalable Web Sites”.

I recorded my NEMOA presentation and posted video.

Steve Souder’s new book, High Performance Web Sites, is excellent. He describes how front end design choices can speed up a site by 10 to 20%.

Super Crunchers, by Ian Ayres, is a great book about the social implications of data mining and testing.

The best book on mathematical modeling is “How to Model It: Problem Solving for the Computer Age” by Starfield, Smith, and Bleloch.

My beef is not so much about the Long Tail concept as it is with the name.

McConnell and Huba discuss social media.

Chouinard’s “Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman” is an inspiring testament to the transformative societal power of ethical privately-held businesses.

Am I the only one who sees irony in Strumpette praising Andrew Keen’s new book blasting anonymous blogging?

I’ve been enjoying Sally McGhee’s book on Outlook tips for managing email, tasks, and calendar intelligently.

A user will stop and ponder each option presented to him wondering “What is this? Do I need this?” And in that split-second, your offer can lose its grip on that user’s attention.

I highly recommend Charles Fishman’s “The Wal-Mart Effect.”

Web analytics today is like baseball statistics before Bill James and Billy Beane: too many online retailers are fixated on counting the wrong events, and miss significant opportunities as a result.

Why Google’ own patners are suing Google over Google Books, and how settling the suits though licensing fees will create large barriers to entry to other book search projects.

Rosenberg tours many of the key ideas and people of the modern software movement. Kudos for smartly organized writing covering a lot of difficult terrain.

Recommended for your web developers: Joel Spolsky’s little book on usability, “User Interface Design for Programmers.”

Why do early hubs like Yahoo have a tremendous advantage? How can later entrants like Google ever sieze share? Why is the internet robust to random damage but vulnerable to terrorist attack?
Why did AIDS spread so rapidly? Why are a handful of hub genes
involved in so many traits? Albert-Laszlo Barabasi uses scale-free network theory to answer these questions in “Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means”.

I have three requirements for books about creativity: they have to be fun, they have to be actionable, and they have to contain a rush of new ideas. Here are three books which do: Jump Start Your Brain by Doug Hall, What a Great Idea by Charles Thompson, and Circle of Innovation by Tom Peters. Did you know if you breathe through your non-dominant nostril your ideas will head off in an entirely fresh direction?

I’m a big fan of scattering great books around the office. It’s a cheap way to circulate fantastic ideas. Here are three outstanding books to toss into the IT bat-cave: Software Engineering For Internet Applications, Joel on Software, and Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age.

Stephens and Rosenberg’s attack against pure XP is on-target and really funny.

Jottings and interesting bits from Debbie Weil’s Corporate Blogging Book