El Tramo | Books

The Myths of Innovation (Scott Berkun)

2010-12-30T00:00:00+01:00

By taking some of the great past and present innovations off the divine pedestal they have been put on, Scott Berkun illustrates what innovating is really about in his Myths of Innovation. And although the subject sounds negative, this classic by Scott Berkun is strangely empowering, inspires everyone to be innovative, and does all this in the extremely pleasant, entertaining, and easy to read style we’re used to from Berkun. Highly recommended!

I always thought that the great innovations in history were mostly about having a great deal of luck and epiphamies, making it demotivating to even try to put my own ideas to work. However, this is one of the first myths that are debunked in the book. By stripping innovations from these inaccurate perfect perceptions, and showing the other forces that drive innovation (hard work, curiosity, motivation, failure, earlier innovations, etc.), this book gives you the exhilerating feeling that it could actually be worthwhile exploring your own ideas. The book also makes your aware of the “filters” that you put on your own (and others’) crazy ideas, encouraging you to open your mind more, and taking away the fear of having ideas in the first place. And without analyzing innovations to death or claiming that there is a magical formula for innovating, you get some handy tips on how to succesfully convert these ideas into real products: creative thinking hacks, motivational techniques, pitching, management, etc.

I found the book to be a very interesting and pleasant (even as an eBook on an iPhone) read. It changed my perception about ideas and innovations quite a bit!

Confessions of a Public Speaker

2009-12-21T00:00:00+01:00

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)!

Beautiful (XMPP) Testing

2009-11-02T00:00:00+01:00

O’Reilly recently released the book Beautiful Testing, a collection of essays about testing and QA in general. As I mentioned earlier, I wrote an article in that book on (unit) testing XMPP protocols, using Swift as a motivating example. Since the book’s scope may (oddly enough) not always be as interesting for developers in general, I released my article under a Creative Commons Attribution license (thanks to the good folks from O’Reilly for encouraging us to do this), which you can find here (or directly from my Git repository). The original excerpt from the book (including the index, list of biographies, and all the fancy artwork) is also available for download under the same license.

I of course encourage you to buy either the PDF or dead tree version of the book, as all the proceeds of the book go to charity.

The Watch

2009-09-04T00:00:00+02:00

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.

“XMPP: The Definitive Guide” Code Examples

2009-07-13T00:00:00+02:00

Although the primary focus of XMPP: The Definitive Guide is explaning the XMPP protocol and all its extensions through text and illustrations, we also included a few Python code examples to help people get started with implementing their own ideas. In fact, we devoted a whole chapter to building an XMPP application, starting out with a simple bot implementation, but gradually extending the application into a full server component. For people who want to try this out for themselves, we’re releasing the source code of all code examples, including a simple echo bot, and different variants of the CheshiR microblogging platform XMPP interface.

All examples are built using the lightweight SleekXMPP Python XMPP library. In fact, SleekXMPP is so lightweight that we included a version in the source bundle, making it even easier to get started implementing your own bots and components.

Do bear in mind that these examples only serve illustrative purposes for the book, so don’t expect very robust code. Although making this code fail-safe is not really our primary goal (since that would involve a lot of code that would only distract the reader), we do welcome bug reports or fixes.

The code examples are available as a source package, or directly from the Git repository (mirrored on GitHub). We will soon put a link to the package on the book’s webpage.

“Beautiful Testing” XMPP Chapter

2009-05-03T00:00:00+02:00

Adam Goucher and Tim Riley (Director of QA at Mozilla) announced a few months ago that they are putting together a Beautiful Testing book for O’Reilly. I took the opportunity to write a chapter about testing in the context of XMPP (more specifically, about testing protocol implementations in Swift), and just submitted the final draft for technical review. The book is expected to be released this August.

Although there are many types of testing being done in the XMPP world, the chapter focuses on the beauty of testing the functionality of XMPP protocol implementations. After a brief introduction on XMPP, it starts out with a description of unit testing simple IQ request/response protocols, and then gradually moves on to higher-level testing of more complex, multi-stage protocols such as session initialization. As you might expect from a developer like me, the chapter is quite heavy on the (C++) code, but I’m told it compensates for the rest of the book ;–)

As with all other books in the O’Reilly “Beautiful” series (which started with Beautiful Code, but has since been followed up by Beautiful Architecture, Beautiful Teams, Beautiful Security, and Beautiful Data), all proceeds of the book go to charity, in this case “Nothing But Nets” (which provides mosquito netting to malaria infested areas of Africa). This means that I can plug this book as much as I want, and still have the feeling I’m actually doing a noble, unselfish thing. (contrary to when I casually mention that you can buy our book XMPP: The Definitive Guide at very sharp prices these days). Some time after the book’s release this summer, I will even make a free version of the chapter available here, so check back soon!

We have an animal

2009-02-08T00:00:00+01:00

O’Reilly just sent us the cover for our upcoming XMPP Book, and it seems we got the world’s smallest ungulate: the lesser mouse-deer. I haven’t seen one in real life before, am not sure I ever want to, but still: great! Have a look below to see what the cover of the book will look like when it hits the stores in 2 months.

Final revision of the XMPP book submitted

2009-02-03T00:00:00+01:00

After a few weeks of heavy labour and long nights, Peter, Kevin, and I just submitted the final revision of “XMPP: The Definitive Guide” to the folks at O’Reilly. All the feedback from our (thorough) reviewers has been processed, we added quite a few extra bits and clarifications (58 pages to be exact), polished the whole thing up, and went through the resulting manuscript with a fine toothed comb. We hope the people who will read this book will be as satisfied with the end result as we are. If all goes according to plan, the book should roll out of the presses in about 2 months. In the mean time, you can expect an update to the on-line rough cut version of the book in the next couple of days.

Rough cuts of XMPP book now available

2008-12-10T00:00:00+01:00

While Kevin, Peter, and I are working very hard to finish the first draft of our upcoming book ‘XMPP: The Definitive Guide’, O’Reilly has recently released early versions of most of the chapters of the book as Rough Cuts. People interested in learning about XMPP today can now get a preliminary version of the book, and get updates as the book progresses.

We're writing an XMPP book

2008-08-21T00:00:00+02:00

I’m excited to announce that Peter, Kevin, and I recently got the green light from O'Reilly to start writing a book about Jabber/XMPP. The book will be targeted at a diverse public: on one hand, people who want to get acquainted with XMPP and will get an introduction and a general overview of XMPP, its workings, and its possibilities. On the other hand, software engineers who want to integrate XMPP into their products will get a guide to implementing different use cases of XMPP through a series of different developer stories. The book is expected to be available in 2009, so start making some room on your bookshelf!