Its more than 2 months and yet there is hardly any work. To make the most of this available time, I have been reading and reading a lot. Thanks to Wipro library for a wonderful collection. Here is a list of books I have read so far and their ratings, reviews.
Title: Necessary But Not Sufficient
Title: Necessary But Not Sufficient
Author: Eliyahu Goldratt
About: Application of TOC to ERP
Rating: 4.5/5
Review: Excellent book and I believe every person associated with ERP/CRM/HRM implementation should read it.
Take away: Software/tools/technologies are necessary, but not sufficient for effective operation of organization. Accurate data, well defined process and continues process improvement is critical for success of Enterprise software projects.
Title: Critical Chain
Author: Eliyahu Goldratt
About: Principles of TOC applied to project management
Rating: 4/5
Review: If you work on projects (any project from construction to software development) and wonder why they never complete on time, then do read this book.
Take away: Critical chain is principles of TOC applied to the traditional critical path (PERT) method of planning for projects.
Title: 2 States
Author: Chetan Bhagat
About: The story of his marriage
Rating: 2/5
Review: Typical bollywood story, narrated like a hindi essay.
Author: Harvard Business Essentials series
About: Guide to doing business effectively for people interested in entrepreneurship.
Rating: 4/5
Review: Covers various aspects of business that an entrepreneur should be aware of before starting his/her company. A must read for anyone thinking to or recently started a new venture.
Title: Changing Minds
Author: Howard Gardner
About: The Art and science of changing our own and other's minds
Rating: 2.5/5
Review: It takes patience to read this book. Howard starts by defining a framework by which he proposed to evaluate how and why mind changes. He then uses it to explain the change of mind of some famous people (e.g.: Bill Clinton, Bush, Gandhi, etc.) The book fails to keep the excitement as it becomes more of analysis based on assumptions of the author. It only covers why mind changes happened in those famous people and does not talk anything about how to change people's mind as proclaimed.
Title: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA): A Planning and Implementation Guide for Business and Technology
Authors: Eric A. Marks, Michael Bell
About: SOA planning guide
Rating: 2.5/5
Review: Explains the SOA principles very well. But I could not read it beyond 4 chapters. The book isn’t structured well. The topics, paragraphs do not build on the concepts. Instead they are random piece of often repeated sentences. Maybe I am not at the level to grasp it all.
Take Away: SOA is all about flexibility, scalability and re-usability. This cannot be just achieved at the software/IT level. It builds on top of the organization’s business processes. The returns of SOA depends a lot on how well are the business processes defined and how much are they flexible, scalable and re-usable.
Based on what I understood from this book, I believe that companies should not directly use Lean/SixSigma for IT/software. Instead they should use lean/sixsigma to refine their business processes and then use the flexibility in IT to adopt them.
Title: 8 things we hate about IT
Author: Susan Cramm
About: How the business and IT should coordinate for better results.
Rating:
Review: This book is addressed to CXOs/leaders on why there is always friction between IT and business leaders and how to avoid them. I did not give this book any rating as I think I am not in a position to truly understand the value of this book. She also has a blog and is a good place to know more on IT leadership.
Authors: Rajkumar Buyya, James Broberg, Andrzej Goscinski
About: Cloud computing and Parallel & Distributed computing
Rating: 3.5/5
Review: This book is intended for people who already have knowledge of Cloud computing and/or have worked on it. This book is more of a catalogue of various whitepapers and research work published by various authors. The best thing about the book is it explains some products available in the market, to address current Cloud scenarios. The references of each chapter are a great source of information about Cloud computing, HPC, Grid and all kinds of Parallel and Distributed computing. Most of the chapters end with current and future research work on the respective topic.
