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59 docs tagged with "book-review"

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5 Love Languages

The book defines 5 different ways we need affection from our loved ones. It covers how you can identify which love language your significant other uses and how to strengthen love by talking to them in their language. It does this by using examples of love languages or dialects and shows how others have used them to a great extent.

Basic Economics

Prices work, and competition works; if someone wants to limit the free market, it is usually a good indicator that they want to make money on it.

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters

This book covers the civil war of Congo, a long period from the mid-nineties to mid-oughts. It portrays the people participating, the forces and the geopolitical games between nations. It also gives a voice to the people itself.

Data Engineering with dbt

This is a book about data engineering, with a sprinkle of dbt as well. What it is not is a book on dbt, it most definitely is a book on data engineering. It contains data engineering knowledge and ways of working.

Data Science the Hard Parts

This book dives into the difficult aspects of data science. The difficult aspects are business value proposition, communication and measuring impact. These topics are discussed and methods for doing this the right way are presented.

Data Strategy

This book is about strategy, and data is the context in which strategy is discussed. There are some things like the McKinsey data maturity model that are discussed, but the main jist is the strategy. ‘Change is inevitable. … Change is constant.’ This is an important aspect of this entire book.

Driving Digital Strategy

This book covers how digital transformations are shaping all industries (Software eating the world). It covers platforms, product as a service and analytics as important concepts.

Fearless Salary Negotiation

This book is about job searching, job salary negotiating and how to do it. Moreover, it also delves a bit into the data on negotiating and also a bit about how to use techniques to negotiate.

Feature Engineering for Machine Learning

This book is about how to make features for machine learning models and implement them into models. The book goes into natural language text, tabular data, and image data. It contains discussions about how to implement good engineering practices in feature engineering.

Finansplaneten

This book is about the history of mankind as a function of finance and economics. It was a good and interesting book.

Fluent Python

This book is a more advanced book on Python and dives more into the nitty-gritty of the language. It is about a lot of the core functionalities of Python and how they work. A lot of internal things, such as iterators, data objects and methods and functions, are discussed and analysed in detail.

Gap Selling

This book describes the concept of gap selling, which is identifying the customer's ideal end state and the gap between the current state and the end state to drive sales.

Getting Started with Streamlit for Data Science

This book is a welcoming introduction to a Python module that has seen rapid growth. It offers a brief overview of the application's capabilities and shows how its user-friendly nature makes it an inclusive tool for both new and experienced data scientists.

Good Strategy Bad Strategy

This book is about embracing the core of what a strategy is. It differentiates between strategy and wishful thinking, masquerading as strategy. It defines what a good strategy is with examples.

Hands-On Unsupervised Learning Using Python

This book is an introduction to unsupervised machine learning techniques and practices. It introduces methods of unsupervised learning for clustering, correlations and time series analysis. It analyses models and provides guidance on how to use them.

Homage to Catalonia

Orwell writes about the Spanish Civil War and occasionally touches on the fascists. He writes about the fractions that the government was more interested in fighting amongst themselves than the enemy. And with some indignation, tells on how lies travel half the world before the truth gets its shoes on.

How Big Things Get Done

This book explores how big projects succeed or fail and the underlying causes. Big things fail, and when they fail, they usually fail catastrophically. The book identifies the causes and explains how to fix them.

Humanocracy

- Bureaucracy is like Pornography, it's hard to find anyone than won't pretend to be offended by it but there's a lot of it around."

I Moved Your Cheese

This book is a fairy tale about mice and labyrinths. The characters of Max, Big, and Zed are musing on the fact that the mice are all in the maze and looking for cheese when there is no one asking why the cheese is always being moved around.

Interpretable Machine Learning

This book is about methods and ways to understand AI and data modeling and how to utilize the different ways of interpreting machine learning models. It gives the basis and then dives into the different types of models and methods you can use. It separates the models into specific to models or model families, and model agnostic.

Machine Learning Engineering

This book is about the practical implementation of machine learning models. It goes through why machine learning should be used, how to implement it, and how to execute in all phasers of the machine learning life-cycle.

Machine Learning Engineering with MLflow

Introduction to ML flow package and how to use it. It is basically an advanded user guide to help with understanding and applying MLFlow for machine learning projects.

Managing Humans

A nice little book about management from an IT manager's perspective. It is easy to read. It contains a lot of nuggets from a long career and helpful perspectives.

Material World

This book covers some of the most important materials in today's world. It covers the extraction, refinement, and use and explains why the material is important and its challenges. It is also, by extension, a book about the modern world.

Modelling Mindsets

This book is mostly about different ways of thinking about models, in the context of making models of real-world phenomena. It dives into the cons and benefits of each mindset and tries to explain how knowing each is a good advantage.

Moral Mazes

This book analyses corporate culture from a sociological perspective and how organizations act. It is an interesting aspect of the corporate culture and how it behaves. As a bonus, there is a shitton of funny anecdotes.

Never Split the Difference

This book is about negotiating and the human aspect of negotiating. It recounts stories of hostage negotiating and other experiences less threatening and tells how this helps you become a better negotiator.

On Food and Cooking

One of the most comprehensive and scientific books on cooking available. All the foods and their origins, their etymology and their scientific composition, are discussed. A stunningly through work, it gives the reader a lot of knowledge on the subject of food.

Practical Recommendation Systems

This book is an easy and good introduction to recommendation systems. It is meant to introduce the concept of recommendation systems and, from there, give concepts and methods on how to make them. This book is about usage rather than the theoretical background.

Practical Vim

This book is a practical introduction to VIM. It contains an introduction to Vim and help with the different modes and how to set it up properly.

Pragmatics of Human Communication

This book is about communication between humans, moreso than communications between entities/institutions and humans. It deals with a lot of interesting behaviour disorders in the context of communications.

Pro Git

This book delves deep into Git. It is nice for an intermediate git professional who would like to have some more understanding of the "under the hood".

Python Testing with Pytest

This book dive into all aspects of python test module Pytest. It describes using tests, patching, and fixture as well as advanced topics such as automatic testing, etc.

Secrets of Consulting

A book about what is required of consultants. It has a lot of rules on how to engage with your clients and what they want. Consulting is about influencing people who ask for it.

Seeing Like a State

This book is an investigation into the world of high modernism and an analysis of the consequences of high modernism.

Serengeti Rules

One of my favorite books I read in 2021; it is a nice book with good and interesting points and is kind of tied to systems thinking. It is about trophic cascades as well as other things.

Simply Said

This book is about how to communicate simply and efficiently. It provides a framework for understanding how to communicate well. Simple is elegant.

Slaughterhouse Five

The book is about war, and imprisonment. It is written in an absurd matter which hides the traumas the person experience. It is an antiwar novel that is written as a comedy.

Start with No

This book is about negotiations but slowly becomes a self-help book. It argues against compromise and says that no is an important word in negotiations. Maybe is the worst word in negotiations.

Stuff Matters

A book about a lot of stuff. It is a book about the stuff we make use of. It consists of a lot of information about everything we use in our daily lives.

Survival of the Savvy

This book is about navigating the corporate world of politics and still remaining a high-integrity individual. It contains guides on how to understand the world of corporate politics and not becomming a pawn. It contains realistic scenarios and is

Systematics

This book is about systems, why they exist, and the rules that govern them. The book dives into the fundamentals of human-made systems and pokes fun at the tribulations of complicated systems and how humans often fail to comprehend the systems.

The Art of Business Value

It is a book that wants to define the concept of Business Value in the context of software mostly. It also delves into the different ways of working and how it affects business value.

The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy

This book dives into the concept of bureaucracy and why it exists. Afterwards, it dives into the three concepts of monkey (chaos tinkering), razor (slowly removing) and sumo wrestler (Using it against itself). These three methods are described in detail to show the reader how to deal with bureaucracy.

The Evolution of Everything

THis book is about the growth of the world, and argues that the human society grows evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. It is filled with tidbits related to this theory.

The Fifth Discipline

This book is about apporaching the difficulties of organizations and businesses using system thinking. It goes through the issues at hand, and how some problems are related to the system in itself rather than people. The goal is to create organizations that learn to work in this context.

The Job Closer

This book is about CVs, resumes, interviews, and negotiating. It is sharp, to the point, and concise. It is focused on the science of job application and skips the fluff.

The Manager's Path

This book is for technical people who aspire to become great leaders. Camille goes through her experiences and discusses what is required of you at each step of the ladder to management. She discusses how to act as a technical manager, how to interact with people and direct reports and identify issues.

The Missing Billionaires

This book is about personal finance and risk. It starts with an interesting thought experiment about 40/60 % heads or tails and how much of your stake you should bet each time. Then it goes into detail.

The Strategist Handbook

This book is a very practical introduction to company strategy, and how to execute strategy. It is for the consultants, managers and planners who define and execute a strategy.

The Trusted Advisor

This book is about consulting. The book highlights that a consultant is not a seller, but rather an advisor who should be a trusted part of a company. The tools and ways for a consultant to gain this trust are discussed in this book.

Turn the Ship Around

This book is about the leadership-leadership principle, where leaders are encouraged to enable other leaders below them in the hierarchy to evolve and take ownership. This book contains the implementation of the leader-leader principle onboard a nuclear submarine and how it went.

UltraLearning

It is a book about learning, based a little bit on the Deep Work and the Atomic Habits style of book. IT is about learning effectively and fast.

Understanding Michael Porter

This book is a condensed and high-level walkthrough of the works of Michael Porter the strategist. It goes through the five forces, how to understand business and companies. It shows how to understand the business and its advantages and disadvantages.

Why Orwell Matters

Hitchens calmly and effectively demolishes the right, the left, and all others who have taken Orwell's name in vain. He delves into the absurd scenarios in 1984 and Animal Farm and highlights the same exact scenarios from real-life scenarios. Imperialism, Fascism, and Communism, the great calamities of the 19th century, are shown through the lens of Orwell, and also how he always lands on the right side of history.