Although I love the thrill of speaking in public, I unfortunately don’t get to do it as often as I used to (once, maybe twice a year lately). The few times I do speak, though, I’ld like it to be as good as possible. That’s why I was very interested in O’Reilly’s announcement of Scott Berkun’s Confessions of a Public Speaker, and so I put the book on my shopping list right away. Not having heard of the author before, I was hoping for the best (light, interesting, with a touch of “funny”), but expecting the worst (“I am your presentation God; people sell their own mother to hear my voice; although you are not worthy, I will lower myself to your level and give some insight in why I am so fantastic.”). After receiving the book in the mail, I read it from the first page to the last in merely one day (a new personal record). Needless to say the book exceeded my expectations.

The book talks about many aspects of public speaking: why are we affraid of talking in public, and how can we avoid this? How is it to earn a living of public speaking? How do you work a tough room? How can you attract people to your talk? How do you keep people from falling asleep? How should you get and interpret feedback? What to do if your talk sucks? What to do when things go wrong? What are the little things pros do? The list just goes on and on.

Not only is this book packed with handy tips and anecdotes, it’s also written in a very light and funny way, making this book both extremely pleasant and interesting to read. A must-read for virtually anyone, especially those who sometimes speak in front of an audience (even small ones)!

When I was a kid, I used to be fascinated by Swiss clocks and watches (actually, mostly anything that was made in Switzerland). However, my attention in watches seems to have faded shortly after I got my very own black & red strapped Swatch: only a few years later, I replaced the Swatch with a digital Casio with built-in calculator, because it looked flashy and cool. I have to admit that the watches I wore (if any) haven’t really improved much since then. However, since I recently came to be without a timepiece again, I took the opportunity to read up on watches before buying a new one. I ordered the first well-rated book on the subject I could find, which happened to be Gene Stone’s The Watch. It turns out that this book was one of the most entertaining books I recently read, and I must admit I have become a watch fanatic ever since I read it.

The Watch begins with a history of time, covering all kinds of timekeeping tools, from the pyramids of ancient egypt, up to the cell phones of today. After this brief history, the author motivates his choice of 50 brands that he describes in detail in the remainder of the book. He concludes the introduction with an entertaining comparison of the watch manufacturer scene with an old European court, consisting of a king, a queen, a prime minister, a knight, and so on.

The main part of the book consists of an in-depth description of 50 of the most notable and famous historical watch brands out there, old and new, literally ranging from A (Lange & Söhne) to Z(enith). The book tells the (often very extended) history behind each brand, the multitude of relations between the different watchmakers, and the most famous watches of each brand. These stories are a very interesting read, and serve as an excellent crash course into the world of watches for newcomers like me (whose knowledge of brands is limited to the obvious Rolex, Swatch, and Omega). However, what really puts the cherry on the cake are undoubtedly the 500 gorgeous high-quality pictures of watches and their movements, depicted in extremely high detail. On any given day, I find it fascinating to pick up the book, flip through the pages, and enjoy just looking at these photos for a while.

After the theory behind the watches and their history, the last part of the book focuses on the actual owning, exploring, and collecting of watches. Besides a handful of tips from the author, this part comes with several testimonies from different people, talking about how they got interested in watches, why they are so fascinated about them, and which one is their ultimate favorite. On top of this, the author created a few top 10s of watches, including “models that everybody should know”, “models that are fun to look at”, “models that look good”, and “brands to look out for”. Again, very valuable information for the uninitated like me.

You can feel that the author has a passion for watches, knows what he’s talking about, and put a lot of love into this book to share his passion and knowledge with the rest of the world. All this makes The Watch both a fascinating and entertaining to read, or, if you don’t feel like reading, a nice way to feast your eyes on pretty shiny pictures.

If, like me, you’re interested in reading even more about watches after finishing The Watch, I can recommend Cult Watches: The World’s Enduring Classics by Michael Balfour. Where The Watch discusses the history of many brands and a variety of their collections, Cult Watches picks out 30 specific “cult” watches (including my favorite, Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Reverso), and tells the detailed story behind each watch and its manufacturer, also accompanied by a lot (though not nearly as many) of high-quality photographs of the insides and outsides of these timepieces. And although most of the watches in this book are mentioned in The Watch as well, some brands that are only mentioned briefly in that book (such as Longines) are mentioned in more detail in Cult Watches. All this makes Cult Watches a nice addition to Gene Stone’s broad reference book.

As the subtitle of the book (`Pragmatic Thinking & Learning’) hints, the main subject of this book is our brain: how we learn things, how we become experts in a certain field, how we get new (innovative) ideas, how we solve problems, … The goal is to use these understandings to become more effective in our learning process, to make it easier to get ideas and to solve hard problems. The book has a lot of the feel of `The Pragmatic Programmer’ to it: easy to read, very pleasantly written, a lot of descriptions of situations and experiences that sound very familiar, and a written description of some thoughts and theories that somehow were already floating around somewhere in your brain, but which you never really paid attention to; and, of course, mainly written from the perspective of a software developer. The book is filled with quite interesting statements and useful tips that will probably keep lingering on in your brain for quite a while. The insights into the human brain that the book provides seem to make a lot of sense, and explain a lot of real-life experiences.

Reading this (beta) book was fun and very learnful. Unfortunately, there is also a downside with a beta book. Not the occasional typo, not the layout that goes slightly wrong in a place or 2, but the fact that, just when you’re hanging on every word of the text, you end up with a few chapters that have nothing but `Coming soon’. Then again, this might be the perfect book for this to happen: while waiting for the second half of the book to appear, my R-brain will have a chance to index the raw data it recorded from the book in the background, and I might be able to read the remainder of the book with more context-awareness. Hey, I think I learned something!

In his book, Spolsky goes through many aspects of user interface design through real-world examples of popular software, showing some do’s and dont’s, and generally making it sound like a fun and challenging job. I had a lot of fun reading his book, since it is well written, funny, easy to read, and very light (130 pages, including many illustrations). The nice thing about the examples is that he doesn’t limit himself to one part of the OS spectrum, but comments (both negatively and positively) on Windows, Mac OS, and even software from the DOS era. And although the examples are a slightly dated (the book is over half a decade old), I still felt like his views applied to all the UIs I’m writing or using today.

I would recommend the book to everyone who comes in contact with user interfaces when programming. If you haven’t agreed with anything he wrote, at least you’ll have had a fun read. And if you do share his point of views, you’ll probably end up with having some personal findings confirmed (like `Pull up the Tools→Options dialog box, and you will see a history of the heated arguments that the software designers had about the design of the product’), come off with some new interesting views, and maybe, like me, feel like UI design can actually be fun and interesting.