2 Quick Book Reviews

Getting Real by
37 Signals

Brought to us by the creators of Ruby on Rails, the self published Getting Real is
as much self aggrandizing manifesto as it is a guidebook for making great software
on a realistic budget. The themes represented in this book read like
a set of digg tag names.

Iterative. Hip. User Experience. Simplicity. Fresh. Open Source. Macintosh. Young.
Startup.

And while the whole book is worthy of reading for its genuine pearls of wisdom,
the sense of utopian unreality is unshakeable. I have the sense that the business
practices of the “simple manifesto” company are valid for rapid development of software
that is of a limited size.

Essentially, who wouldn’t want to work this way? But do these methodologies
scale?

Or maybe I am just getting old and crotchety.

The
Ambler Warning by Robert Ludlum

Robert Ludlum is the man. The master. He is the author of the
original amnesiac-spy-on-the-loose novels, the Jason Bourne series. The list
of intrigue novels that he has written is as long as my arm, but I suspect something
fishy.

I believe that Mr. Ludlum has hired a staff (maybe just 1 person) to write his novels
for him. Ludlum novels have degenerated into the written equivalent of “Enemy
of the State”. His recent work is a series of written cutaway shots
exposing nipples and blood squirting from the eye of the bad guys who carry shields.

Note to Self: Books purchased in the Walmart checkout line will rarely compare
favorably to things found in collectable book shops.