Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases Through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation


Jez Humble - 2010
    This groundbreaking new book sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers, and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours-- sometimes even minutes-no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base. Jez Humble and David Farley begin by presenting the foundations of a rapid, reliable, low-risk delivery process. Next, they introduce the "deployment pipeline," an automated process for managing all changes, from check-in to release. Finally, they discuss the "ecosystem" needed to support continuous delivery, from infrastructure, data and configuration management to governance. The authors introduce state-of-the-art techniques, including automated infrastructure management and data migration, and the use of virtualization. For each, they review key issues, identify best practices, and demonstrate how to mitigate risks. Coverage includes - Automating all facets of building, integrating, testing, and deploying software - Implementing deployment pipelines at team and organizational levels - Improving collaboration between developers, testers, and operations - Developing features incrementally on large and distributed teams - Implementing an effective configuration management strategy - Automating acceptance testing, from analysis to implementation - Testing capacity and other non-functional requirements - Implementing continuous deployment and zero-downtime releases - Managing infrastructure, data, components and dependencies - Navigating risk management, compliance, and auditing Whether you're a developer, systems administrator, tester, or manager, this book will help your organization move from idea to release faster than ever--so you can deliver value to your business rapidly and reliably.

The Effective Executive


Peter Drucker - 2018
    Usually this involves doing what other people have overlooked, as well as avoiding what is unproductive.He identifies five talents as essential to effectiveness, and these can be learned; in fact, they must be learned just as scales must be mastered by every piano student regardless of his natural gifts. Intelligence, imagination and knowledge may all be wasted in an executive job without the acquired habits of mind that convert these into results. One of the talents is the management of time. Another is choosing what to contribute to the particular organization. A third is knowing where and how to apply your strength to best effect. Fourth is setting up the right priorities. And all of them must be knitted together by effective decision-making. How these can be developed forms the main body of the book. The author ranges widely through the annals of business and government to demonstrate the distinctive skill of the executive. He turns familiar experience upside down to see it in new perspective. The book is full of surprises, with its fresh insights into old and seemingly trite situations.

Right Away and All At Once


Greg Brenneman - 2016
    The techniques that will grow your business will also help you achieve a rich, purposeful, and integrated life. In Right Away and All At Once, Brenneman takes what he’s learned from turning around or tuning up many businesses?including Continental Airlines and Burger King?and distills it into a simple, clear, 5-step roadmap that anyone can follow. His 5 steps teach you how to prepare a succinct Go Forward plan, build a fortress balance sheet, grow your sales and profits, choose all-star servant leaders, and empower your team. For more than thirty years, Brenneman has seen these steps foster dramatic results in a variety of business environments. But ten years ago he realized that he could apply these same business principles to improve his life and build a lasting moral legacy. He found he could make better decisions by carefully taking the most important facets of his life?faith, family, friendship, fitness, and finance?into consideration. Brenneman’s inspiring examples, from both his business and life, demonstrate the astounding effects these 5 steps can have when you apply them right away and all at once.

Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process


Kenneth S. Rubin - 2012
    Leading Scrum coach and trainer Kenny Rubin illuminates the values, principles, and practices of Scrum, and describes flexible, proven approaches that can help you implement it far more effectively. Whether you are new to Scrum or years into your use, this book will introduce, clarify, and deepen your Scrum knowledge at the team, product, and portfolio levels. Drawing from Rubin's experience helping hundreds of organizations succeed with Scrum, this book provides easy-to-digest descriptions enhanced by more than two hundred illustrations based on an entirely new visual icon language for describing Scrum's roles, artifacts, and activities. Essential Scrum will provide every team member, manager, and executive with a common understanding of Scrum, a shared vocabulary they can use in applying it, and practical knowledge for deriving maximum value from it.

Move Fast: How Facebook Builds Software


Jeff Meyerson - 2021
    You may not like Facebook, but you can't deny its success. And to a large degree, that success stems from the "move fast" ethos. The entire culture of Facebook is built for speed.Move Fast is an exploration of modern software strategies and tactics through the lens of Facebook. Relying on in-depth interviews with more than two dozen Facebook engineers, this book explores the product strategy, cultural principles, and technologies that made Facebook the dominant social networking company. Most importantly, Move Fast investigates how you can apply those strategies to your creative projects.It's not easy to build a software company, but once you know how to move fast, your company will be prepared to build a strategy that benefits from the world's rapid changes, rather than suffering from them.

Art of Leadership


J. Donald Walters - 2001
    Most leaders need reminding everyday that with their privileges comes responsibility and obligation. If any young man or woman seeking to become a leader and not a manager only reads one book on leadership, let it be this one!

The Spatial Web: How Web 3.0 Will Connect Humans, Machines, and AI to Transform the World


Gabriel Rene - 2019
    Blade Runner, The Matrix, Star Wars, Avatar, Star Trek, Ready Player One and Avengers show us futuristic worlds where holograms, intelligent robots, smart devices, virtual avatars, digital transactions, and universe-scale teleportation work together perfectly, somehow seamlessly combining the virtual and the physical with the mechanical and the biological. Science fiction has done an excellent job describing a vision of the future where the digital and physical merge naturally into one — in a way that just works everywhere, for everyone. However, none of these visionary fictional works go so far as to describe exactly how this would actually be accomplished. While it has inspired many of us to ask the question—How do we enable science fantasy to become....science fact? The Spatial Web achieves this by first describing how exponentially powerful computing technologies are creating a great “Convergence.” How Augmented and Virtual Reality will enable us to overlay our information and imaginations onto the world. How Artificial Intelligence will infuse the environments and objects around us with adaptive intelligence. How the Internet of Things and Robotics will enable our vehicles, appliances, clothing, furniture, and homes to become connected and embodied with the power to see, feel, hear, smell, touch and move things in the world, and how Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies will secure our data and enable real-time transactions between the human, machine and virtual economies of the future. The book then dives deeply into the challenges and shortcomings of the World Wide Web, the rise of fake news and surveillance capitalism in Web 2.0 and the risk of algorithmic terrorism and biological hacking and “fake-reality” in Web 3.0. It raises concerns about the threat that emerging technologies pose in the hands of rogue actors whether human, algorithmic, corporate or state-sponsored and calls for common sense governance and global cooperation. It calls for business leaders, organizations and governments to not only support interoperable standards for software code, but critically, for ethical, and social codes as well. Authors Gabriel René and Dan Mapes describe in vivid detail how a new “spatial” protocol is required in order to connect the various exponential technologies of the 21st century into an integrated network capable of tracking and managing the real-time activities of our cities, monitoring and adjusting the supply chains that feed them, optimizing our farms and natural resources, automating our manufacturing and distribution, transforming marketing and commerce, accelerating our global economies, running advanced planet-scale simulations and predictions, and even bridging the gap between our interior individual reality and our exterior collective one. Enabling the ability for humans, machines and AI to communicate, collaborate and coordinate activities in the world at a global scale and how the thoughtful application of these technologies could lead to an unprecedented opportunity to create a truly global “networked” civilization or "Smart World.” The book artfully shifts between cyberpunk futurism, cautionary tale-telling, and life-affirming call-to-arms. It challenges us to consider the importance of today’s technological choices as individuals, organizations, and as a species, as we face the historic opportunity we have to transform the web, the world, and our very definition of reality.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity


Alan Cooper - 1999
    Cooper details many of these meta functions to explain his central thesis: programmers need to seriously re-evaluate the many user-hostile concepts deeply embedded within the software development process. Rather than provide users with a straightforward set of options, programmers often pile on the bells and whistles and ignore or de-prioritise lingering bugs. For the average user, increased functionality is a great burden, adding to the recurrent chorus that plays: "computers are hard, mysterious, unwieldy things." (An average user, Cooper asserts, who doesn't think that way or who has memorised all the esoteric commands and now lords it over others, has simply been desensitised by too many years of badly designed software.) Cooper's writing style is often overblown, with a pantheon of cutesy terminology (i.e. "dancing bearware") and insider back-patting. (When presenting software to Bill Gates, he reports that Gates replied: "How did you do that?" to which he writes: "I love stumping Bill!") More seriously, he is also unable to see beyond software development's importance--a sin he accuses programmers of throughout the book. Even with that in mind, the central questions Cooper asks are too important to ignore: Are we making users happier? Are we improving the process by which they get work done? Are we making their work hours more effective? Cooper looks to programmers, business managers and what he calls "interaction designers" to question current assumptions and mindsets. Plainly, he asserts that the goal of computer usage should be "not to make anyone feel stupid." Our distance from that goal reinforces the need to rethink entrenched priorities in software planning. -- Jennifer Buckendorff, Amazon.com

I Have the Watch: Becoming a Leader Worth Following


Jon Rennie - 2019
     Through seven deployments commanding sailors in the complex and dangerous world of nuclear submarine warfare, Jon Rennie experienced a deep form of leadership. On a sub, there is no escape. No “after work.” No home to commute to. You live and lead side-by-side with the crew, every day. What Rennie didn’t realize was how much his time underwater prepared him to lead global industrial businesses and startups across multiple industries. Becoming a leader worth following begins—and ends—with people. “This book cuts to the heart of the matter of leadership: it’s all about people.” Says Joshua D. Cotton, PhD, Founder and CEO, VetStoreUSA With a special foreword by John Brubaker, Author of Seeds of Success, Rennie lays out a case for becoming a people-centered leader. Leaders have the watch. They are not only accountable for the results of the organization, but they are also responsible for the people who work for them. Leadership is a people business. The actions of a leader will have a deep impact on the lives and careers of the people they are responsible for. Natasha Goldstein, Founder and CEO, The Accountkeepers says, “As the founder of a fast-growing, people-based business, I could not put this book down. Unlike any other book on leadership I’ve read, Jon boils it down to what really matters: how you treat people.” Great leaders know that employees who are respected, appreciated, and are given the chance to grow will go the extra mile for your organization. This book provides real-world leadership wisdom written from a hands-on perspective. If you want to be a more effective leader, this is the one book you should read this year. “Start becoming a better leader today by reading this book.” Says Heather Eason, Founder and CEO, SELECT Power Systems

Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow


Matthew Skelton - 2019
    But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs? Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity.In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help readers choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams.Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.

Information Technology for Management: Transforming Organizations in the Digital Economy


Efraim Turban - 1995
    Throughout, the emphasis is on how IT provides organizations with strategic advantage by facilitating problem solving, increasing productivity and quality, improving customer service, and enabling business process reengineering. It also covers the latest real-world developments, including the introduction of applied grid computing and utility computing.

SAFe 4.5 Distilled: Applying the Scaled Agile Framework for Lean Enterprises


Richard Knaster - 2018
    SAFe addresses this primary goal, and offers these further benefits: reduced time-to-market, improved quality, stronger alignment across geographically distributed multi-disciplinary teams, and collaboration across teams to deliver meaningful value to customers with reduced cycle time." --Sundaresan Jagadeesan, SW CoE Program Director, Philips To succeed in today's adapt-or-die marketplace, businesses must be able to rapidly change the way they create and deliver value to their customers. Hundreds of the world's most successful companies-including Intel, Capital One, AstraZeneca, Cisco, and Philips-have turned to the Scaled Agile Framework(R) (SAFe(R)) to achieve agility at scale and maintain a competitive edge. SAFe(R) 4.5 Distilled: Applying the Scaled Agile Framework(R) for Lean Enterprises explains how adopting SAFe can quickly improve time to market and increase productivity, quality, and employee engagement. In this book, you will Understand the business case for SAFe: its benefits, the problems it solves, and how to apply it Get an overview of SAFe across all parts of the business: team, program, value stream, and portfolio Learn why SAFe works: the power of SAFe's Lean-Agile mindset, values, and principles Discover how systems thinking, Agile development, and Lean product development form the underlying basis for SAFe Learn how to become a Lean-Agile leader and effectively drive an enterprise-wide transformation Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement


Eliyahu M. Goldratt - 1984
    His factory is rapidly heading for disaster. So is his marriage. He has ninety days to save his plant—or it will be closed by corporate HQ, with hundreds of job losses. It takes a chance meeting with a colleague from student days—Jonah—to help him break out of conventional ways of thinking to see what needs to be done.The story of Alex's fight to save his plant is more than compulsive reading. It contains a serious message for all managers in industry and explains the ideas which underline the Theory of Constraints (TOC) developed by Eli Goldratt.

The Honest Real Estate Agent: A Training Guide For a Successful First Year and Beyond as a Real Estate Agent


Mario Jannatpour - 2011
    This is the book for you because it will help you hit the ground running once you get your license. It is written by an actual, active Realtor. Mario Jannatpour is with RE/MAX Alliance in Louisville, Colorado and what he writes about is based on his experience of what it takes to be successful today as a Realtor. Mario has been a Realtor since 2002. Reader Review: Are you green in real estate or a veteran? Do you know what buyers and sellers are looking for when they are looking at you? What qualities differenciate you from your competition? Mario has helped pin point what today's buyers and sellers are looking for in their real estate agent giving relavent information as well as insight on how you should handle different situations. We all know that honesty is the best policy yet the profession of representation is riddled with pot holes where one can stray. This book will help any new agent or seasoned agent gain a true north when dealing with clients. Mario's first book, Must See Inside, was a great introduction to the real estate business and with this book, The Honest Real Estate Agent, Mario dives deeper on how to "be" a real estate agent which means doing the right thing, always! I sincerely recommend this book for anyone who is getting into the business and wants to get a firm handle of how to "be" great at your job. Addy Saeed, RE/MAX Active Realty (Toronto, Canada)

Everything I know about LEAN I learned in first grade


Robert O. Martichenko - 2008
    This book connects Lean tools to the Lean journey, shows how to identify and eliminate waste, and aids the reader in seeing Lean for what it truly is: to create a learning and problem solving culture. Written to educate the entire organization on the fundamentals of Lean thinking, this is the perfect source to engage all team members at all levels of an organization.