Book Reviews
Just as I have a book reviews section at my spanish website La Web de Programacion, here you will find reviews in english of books I've purchased or obtained on purpose and I think can be of interest to anyone.
Title: Blog Profits Blueprint
Author: Yaro Starak
Language: English
When I came to this free ebook I first thought "why reading it if I don't want to monetize my blog?". I'm a big fan of "don't do to others what you don't like done to you" (or however it is said in english). I hate ad-populated pages, I don't like advertising in RSS feeds... hell, I've been using Ad-block since it appeared!
But anyway, I love reading so why not learn something about how to earn money with a blog and maybe, just if I feel is not agressive to readers, apply one or two techniques here?
The book is a bit too optimistic. I've seen lots of blogs and I don't think all of them can make money. This is no "super-secret", you need to have good content to be able to generate visits and potentially money sources. But it is true too that by not doing anything clearly you won't get anything ;)
It provides a small non-technical approach to what a blog is and what benefits it brings, very well explained, before entering in how to monetize one. Inside the "business" part, gives away some suggestions, clarifies what your goal should be, etcetera.
Includes interesting topics as "passion vs profit", pilars for building a good blog, marketing a blog, available communication channels (mostly as traffic sources for your blog)...
There is a big section about generating incomes, as the tittle suggests, which is the most important part. I won't enter in details, but gives good examples and ways of making money.
Not a bad reading to get some interesting ideas, but does not discover any magical formulae apart from "spend time and effort on what you do".
Title: Videogame Marketing and PR
Author: Scott Steinberg
Publisher: Embassy Multimedia Consultants
Language: English
The book is clearly aimed at development studios. It is basically a
compilation of suggestions, success stories, usual mistakes and recommendations
related with marketing and public relations in the videogame industry.
It is interesting however for a more broad audience to read it and learn how
difficult is creating a videogame this days. The book contains money sums, stime
chedules, estimates of team people numbers, handicaps... I like too the
real-world examples that any avid gamer will notice.
Some sections are like a big speech, others are a group of points, and others
have a question-answer format. A chapter with advices from the industry
professionals is also here (and quite interesting). It has some auto-advertising
(the author is of course in the game PR sector), but nothing annoying or
excessive.
While I'm not becoming a PR agent (at least in the near future ;) it was more
like a casual reading that a serious one. I already knew some of the examples,
but others may be of use for a game dev. studio.
Title: Writing Secure Code for Windows Vista
Author: Michael Howard & David LeBlanc
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Language: English
Initially I didn't liked Windows Vista. A resource hog, some incompatibilities... But I had to use it at work so I installed it and worked with it for two months. After that, I really like the security features it has, but I felt like missing more details about specific topics... So I decided to buy this book.
Writing Secure Code for Windows Vista comes as a, mostly C++ oriented (although contains some C# examples), "how to use all new features" book. Very well structured, with lots of code examples, best practices, direct to the topic, and one thing I liked a lot: very sincere. If something is working bad, the authors state it clearly (for example, the Windows Firewall API, which has bugs), and they even provide workarounds to avoid them.
Down to the content, the book covers a lot of topics: New safer C functions, banned APIs, new APIs, UAC, token manipulation, integrity levels, code signing, virtualization, buffer overrun defenses, IPv6, Secure Socket extensions, Windows Firewall (Vista version, of course), IE7 security mechanisms & defenses (very interesting), Windows services development best practices, protected mode API and DEP, and the new CNG (Cryptography API:
Next Generation).
Even if you don't usually develop with C++ I highly recommend this book. With it you will learn a lot about all the new security features of Vista. You just need some basic knowledge of standard Windows security features and some C++/API programming.
Title: The Design of Everyday Things
Author: Donald A. Norman
Publisher: Basic Books
Language: English
The Design of Everyday Things is not a common book. It is a book about thinking how things are made, and more important, why they are made that way. It's a fantastic way of speaking about usability, about utility, and about design.
After you read it, you'll start to look all around you. You can apply it to software design: Remember those hellish tools nobody could master even reading once and again the help? Or remember that tool that was so easy to use you didn't even opened the help... And analyse them, extract that factors make it good (or bad).
But you can apply it to your life. Are you dumb because you can't program your dishwasher, or maybe is that having 10 buttons is a mess?
I am left-handed and a lot of times I've thought "I can't do this well because it's designed for right handed". Now, sometimes I look more closely and see that even for them it's hard to use.
Something not common to read to learn something about usability and design, but a good source to learn them.
Title: Organiza tus ideas utilizando mapas mentales
Author: Jean-Luc Deladrière, Frédéric Le Bihan, Pierre Mongin, Denis Rebaud
Publisher: Gestión 2000
Language: Spanish
Mind Maps are a technique I found interesting when I first read about it, mainly because I tend to make incredible "packed" abstracts and indexes about things. When at the university, I compacted some books in 15 pages to study (and it worked ;)
So, when I read about drawing just the ideas, expanding them like tree branches, focusing on not writing redundant info but the topics, the facts, the critical info... I thought "this is perfect for me".
The book is enjoyable, easy to read, with lots of examples, sample mind maps, and per-chapter abstracts (of course presented as a mind-map).
I recommend it without any doubt, very very interesting.
I think I've catch the idea of how to make mind maps perfectly. Let's see if I can put it into practice at work :D