Books on Adam Koszek - Personal Website

Drawing in 30 days

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 22 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Trying to take the first steps in drawing with this book is much easier. I wanted to get more professional lesson and do something about my mindless doodling, and this book was the right purchase.

If you’ve never drawn, you get to do step by step introduction about techniques, supplies and really easy, approachable examples of simple things that will look decent when you try by yourself.

Get it and your results will be improving the more the more you practice.

Memoirs of Hadrian

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 01 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This books is meant to be a collection of letters from Hedrian to Marcus Aurelius. Great content and excellent research has been done to actually provide enough details about the insights about Hadrian.

The structure was so-so, since “letters” are way too long, and in general I’d had a feeling that the story isn’t really going anywhere.

The fact that it’s all has been written by someone who actually didn’t live in the same times as Harian is pretty remarkable.

Everybody Writes

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Didn’t remember this book whatsoever after several weeks after reading it.

Shoe Dog: A memoir by the creator of Nike

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 24 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Ruby Cookbook

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Clean Code

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This book is a classic for books about writing software, but in general I found it underwhelming. Java code is verbose by default, with all its public, static, protected even refactored, you end up with a similar level of complexity. That’s the take I had from that book: several examples were indeed refactored and the end code was shown, but I had “meh” feeling about whether it really helped the program readability.

The Art of Plain Talk

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 03 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Probably one of the best books on language, writing and readability in general. It’s very good take on phrasing readable sentences, keeping language clear and concise.

The key take away were the results of the readability studies Flesch did in early XXIth century. He found certain relationships with age and education and its impact on text readability.

Before I read this, I didn’t know about the algorithms for readability. The formulas in the book seemed a little abstract, yet there’s something appealing at having a single score of your written text. Microsoft Word has Flesch’s algorithm embedded.

Scientific Advertising

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

David Ogilvy and many other authors of copy-written ads mentioned Claude C. Hopkins was their hero, and that his book is a mandatory reading. You should at least look at it, if you want to get a full experience for your advertising and marketing education.

The myths of advertising being “creative” are debunked here. The advertising from a purely scientific format is shown. Ads are treated like salesperson, and the same demands are expected out of them. Bringing money to the table, and making a sale is what he talked about all the time.

King of Madison Avenue

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

If you want to make software products, you must know design. Even when I worked for the hardware company, my software was used by humans, and they object if what you make sucks. I’ve made a script used by many engineers for result reporting. And the output was shared in the web, PDF and printed form. For stuff like this you must know design, otherwise you’ll fail miserably.

This is one of the few books for hackers to introduce you to design step by step. The amount of unnecessary fluff is minimal. It uses easy language, without many scientific details which you’d forget anyway.

Non-designers design book

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is a biography of David Ogilvy of Ogilvy and Mather.

You will get a behind the scenes look at the advertising agency and business, but you won’t get much of advises about advertising of how to write a good body copy.

For this, look at other books by the same author.

I decided to read this book, since I was intrigued by Ogilvy, since it appears he did his homework on measuring the efficiency of ads like no one else, and I wanted to understand how much of what I see in the Internet is a well-measured manipulation, researched or a random spam.

Ogilvy on Advertising

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

So you have built something and you want to sell it. Direct approach probably works best, and you can blast the information about your product to the potential prospects through the e-mail. But you don’t know how?

You’ve never done it, right? You just keep making websites and software, and you’re good at it, but somehow your stuff isn’t gaining traction?

Do you make it a short e-mail, with a simple image on top? Or a long one, explaining everything step-by-step?

256 bloghacks

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 07 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

You created a blog, but it sucks? It has beautiful minimized HTML, great JavaScript and CSS and renders flawlessly on iOS 6. The problem is that nobody but you is accessing your blog?

Exactly.

I made this blog in 2012, but didn’t really think about it much. I restarted the efforts in 2015 and 2016, but had moderate success (hundreds visitors “spiking” when I published something, and then traffic dying out after 2 days). That’s the moment in publishing online where you think: “Really, that’s all I get by publishing stuff to millions of people?”

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 13 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

White Coat Investor

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 05 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Would you like to get better with the personal finance?

Who wouldn’t right?

You’re not alone, if you still think that some things in your wallet happen by accident. And often you forget and later are surprised.

Many of us are like this, and often getting a good advise of how to change this stage of things is challenging.

This book could be a remedy. Originally targeted towards doctors, I’ve found it very useful as an engineer. Just smart part of this book is directed towards medical procession. Most of it is universal.

Good to Great

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 27 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Soft Skills: The software developer's life manual

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 18 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Procrastination: Why You Do It, What to Do About It Now

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

747

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 04 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

An amazing insight into the building of the biggest passenger plane of that time. This book does a good job at explaining what building complex engineering projects are all about. One of the phrases that stuck with me was that the plane is designed so that all the parts can be serviceable and testable, and whole which are too deeply buried inside of the structure of the plane must last 20 years.

Launch It

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 18 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

On writing well

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 15 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This book is similar in nature to other guides, but it’s fairly packed. It’s a very useful little title that I picked up, since as a non-native speaker, you naturally “miss” things other people may find obvious.

This is one of the top bestsellers on books about writing.

Zinsser went though the written English language in points and he explained how to remove clutter, simplify your English and bump up your writing. It’s the first book where I understood that the passive voice weakens your expression.

The Willpower Instinct

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 27 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The Phoenix Project

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 17 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The Everything Store

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 13 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 03 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Miles

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 24 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

On Writing

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Audiobook format of “On writing” was excellent. King read it himself. This is what I like about audiobook: they make the form be rich and more colorful by adding this another dimension. This might be one of the few positions where I can recommend the audiobook over a paper book.

First of all books are great. I believe you’ll have the same while reading or listening to King.

There’s a great part about writing as compared to telepathy. This was my favorite moment in a book. Another one was King’s commentary on his own accident.

The Art of Learning

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 15 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

It’s at least two years now that I’ve listened to it, but I I still remember good stuff from this book. Like imersing yourself with things you study about and making sure you keep recalling/using them often. You’ll be a better learner after reading this book for sure. This comes from a person who mastered more than one field and carefully gathered notes on what it meant and how he did it.

Delivering happiness

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 12 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Daily Rituals

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 03 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The Total Recall

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 15 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Facebook Paper and Copyright screens

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In the process of working on Sensorama I wanted to get inspired by a well designed modern mobile app. Figuring out the libraries and technologies people use in well designed products is often a good way to go. Even Apple uses existing products as a base for their next products. But how to find out more about software internals?

Legal pages are those boring documents that none of us ever usually reads. But they are also a great source of engineering information. As makers of software, due to legal and copyright issues, we need to give credits to authors of the libraries we use, as well as inform users about potential risks. And no - you can’t just use the copy & paste function, obfuscate it with your own variable names, reformat tabs to spaces and shift a few lines here and there. Technically you’re supposed to credit people for their work. Basically: help people who have written free code to put their names out there in the wild so that now and then they might land some consulting gigs in exchange for free (as in “free beer”) tools.

Facebook Paper and Copyright screens

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Programming Ruby, The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Really good book which I’ve picked up after my exposure to Teach yourself Ruby in 21 days

The accompanying the book is the archive of 1600+ examples in the source code form, which I’ve written about here:

https://www.koszek.com/blog/2015/09/01/the-single-biggest-collection-of-ruby-scripts/

Worth to note: 50% of this book is API reference. Initially I didn’t like that, but now I feel like it’d be a good opportunity to go and create some Anki sets from this reference for further revising.

Mind for Numbers

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 07 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Dot.Bomb: My Days and Nights at an Internet Goliath

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 15 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Critical Chain

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Nothing else than a description. At some point point I simply stopped paying attention, since it appeared to me that a lot of the knowledge in here was already in The Goal

From Zero To One

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 24 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 25 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

If you were present somewhere close to Bay Area circa 2014–2015, and you’ve asked about some resources for entrepreneurs and people interested in startups, there are several well-known classics which are considered a Mekka of startup knowledge. Today I’m proud to announce that by audio bookshelf has been extended by 1 important resource and I feel soon it’ll become a classic referred to by many individuals.

Horowitz’s “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” is written in a pretty interesting style. Just like one of the things which you may not know about Steve Vai is that he’s a bee-keeper, you may not know is that Ben Horowitz seems to be be a fan of certain style of music. Which one? Get to learn it from the book. Prelude to each chapter consists of quotations from several artists. I may not be a big fan of any of them, but I’m a big fan of all drummers which these people hire for live tours. Consider it a quiz!

Twenty-one Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 14 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Even though that books on whining aren’t among ones which I like the most, I must say that Daisey’s title surprised me greatly. This is a very unique book, both in a style and the content. Author, unlike many ones which I’ve got to know, with a great distance to himself explains how it felt to be a part of early days of Amazon. Moving from customer service through the steps of organizational ladder he landed in departments which made no sense back then.

Organized mind

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 20 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes it makes me think how much information XXI century human being can intake with intellectual hiccup. It’s a fairly known fact that as we move forward with medicine, science and human knowledge in general nowadays, the knowledge of past generations starts to be available at our fingertips.

My detour to “Organized Mind” was in hope to figure out how other people deal with information overload in modern times. I struggle with a amount of data you can intake from interviews, audiobooks and podcasts. Other people I know struggle from task and priority management. When I think about this, one can open Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages on a 27-inch screen and with several screen scroll you can spot, analyze, classify and consume content (let’s skip the usefulness or the value derived from these sources) and act upon it. How to apply the same methods to all information which flows in your direction? Is there a system?

Just My Type

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 18 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

We’re all surrounded by text. Be it an electronic version or a good and old-school paper hardcover book, the thing that makes books readable are fonts.

I don’t exactly remember how I start to pay attention to how letters in books are shaped, but it was pretty early on. My English teacher in a 2nd grade of primary school exposed me to British and American English books, and I’ve noticed significant different in letter shapes, as their block letters were not alike script taught in Polish school.

Made it stick

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Accelerating learning should probably be my logical step before I started to read and listen to (audio) books, yet I came to this topic quite late. During one of the trips back home in KQED I’ve listened to a great podcast entitled: “Science of Smart” where a research of Roedriger was mentioned.

General message out of this book is that studying-by-repeating and cramming for exams are the most common “learning” techniques applied by students of high-school and universities. Yet the research proves that it’s testing and quizing that actually helps us retain the knowledge and actually master it.

The Innovators

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Probably the most comprehensive study on the history and current state of computing and innovation. From Ada Byron to Bill Gates. From mechanical computers, through tubes to the transistor. Explained is the history of modern computing.

Chapter 3 reminded me that in the early days people building computers didn’t recognize the domain of programming at all. It’s quite fascinating to think that I graduated from a domain which 50 years earlier wasn’t even recognized. In the old days people building computers would write programs, and due to the nature of their programming (low-level programming with 0 abstraction of hardware interfaces) it’s hard to be surprise by that state of things.

In the Plex

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In The Plex is a very detailed explanation of the insides of Google.

Few big corporations established enough of a cultures and values to actually drive talented employees towards them, and Google is unquestionably one of them. Structured after a college dorm Google is the place where most talented college graduates end up

Search engine started at Stanford, and sponsored by two mentors of Silicon Valley: Andy Bechtolsheim and David Cheriton moved from being built with cheap computers in a Beowulf cluster to being a “cloud”, still built with commodity hardware, but with many, many improvements from the software side to make the search reliable.

The Founder's Dilemmas

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 30 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This book was on my TODO for quite a while, as I was in the search for a some answers related to problems founders of startups and individual projects face.

Have you ever had an idea and wanted to collect a team of friends and execute them? If so, you’ll know what these problems might be.

The feel of the book is similar to the Millionaire’s Mind, as the author relates to his broad study and statistical evidence across a lot of startups. The issue is that only small number of these startups are used for the main thread of a discussion.

Picture This: How Pictures Work

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 27 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This little great book is a perfect night read: little words. If present, they’re very condensed, filled only with very rich content. But words is not why this book is great: its illustrative graphics helps you understand why pictures work how they work. And why.

Book is made up from a story, which starts with the page number one and builds till the very last page. Each page contains a sample image with short explanation and gives the reader a moment to look at the image and figure out how it feels.

Teach yourself Ruby in 21 days

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 24 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is a very nice, slick, little book with a fair amount of background in Ruby to actually remind/teach one how to work with this language.

Chapter subdivision is done surprisingly well. I assume that if you’ve programmed in the other scripting languages such as Perl of Python, you should be able to squeeze book’s ``Day’’ in a corporate’s date.

Otherwise: the measurement is probably pretty accurate.

The exercises are interesting, unlike in some other books. Doing the exercises made me feel like I’m actually accomplishing something practical, and not yet another:

The Idea Factory

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 04 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The Power of Twitter

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 19 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

For some time now I was promising myself that I’d try to put social media under my control, since thanks to many website I use on a daily basis I realized communication is a good thing. Twitter usage has been hard to understand to myself, as I came from a UNIX culture of hardcore engineers no interested in non-Terminal, non-black-and-white things.

How to read a book?

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 13 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Linchpin

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Accelerated learning techniques

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This little and interesting book touches topics such as paraphrasing newly read material, together with hints on how to stay focused.

There was a nice pearl about how to become a very literate person. Recipe was:

1 book
1 poem
1 short story

I suspect I’ll have to come up with a CS equivalent of this list.

Mind mapping was mentioned. Before I knew how it is called I was using it, for things which I were to do right the next day. Being in bed and far away from a pen, I tried to throw a pillow in the middle of a room while thinking about specific problem/task. The next day right after waking up I questioned the location of the pillow and immediately recalled what I was thinking the previous night.

Essential: Essays by The Minimalists

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 28 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Are you smart enough to work at Google?

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

One Minute Millionaire

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Home Buying For Dummies

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is a nice-to-have 101 on real-estate. Pretty cool.

Power hiring

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I hate people

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The title of a book is probably to boost sales a little, yet I fell is that “Office survival guide” would be a better title for this position.

This book is basically for people who haven’t read XKCD or Dilbert. If you’ve read those, you know how difficult it sometimes is to get things organized in the office. But if you haven’t, I suggest you pick this one. It’s a nice little book summarizing the procedures for getting your work done in a corporate setting.

I'm Feeling Lucky

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 14 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

David and Goliath

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 07 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This photo tells it all:

And the book is about just that: smaller companies winning over big competitors.

The 4-Hour Workweek

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The real book of real-estate

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 29 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

People Are Idiots and I Can Prove It!

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 24 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The Billionaire and the Mechanic

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 14 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The art of start

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 02 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Kawasaki’s book I read long time ago, It’s a nice little booklet, relatively short, relatively packed with content.

So hey – I did what I did with other recommendations of books.

I made up a date in which I want other people think I read it, and after a short break I’m trying to tune jazzy swingy samba sound in the background and recall what did I got from the book.

The checklist manifesto

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 02 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The first billion is the hardest

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 04 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Extreme Toyota

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 23 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Screw business as usual

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 14 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Father & Son -- my life at IBM

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 08 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Direct from Dell

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Ben and Jerry

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

One of the widely advertised books on bootstrapping of the company. Coming from nothing to the conclusion that both of the founders want to work together on something fairly non-standard.

There were several good examples on how these two guys had to adjust to the business conditions to connects end to end together.

The story of research and development of cookie dough was quite “different” as I’ve known little to nothing on the process of ice-cream making before. Same about business story behind Cherry Garcia Ice Cream.

Crossing the chasm

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is a classic in the Silicon Valley. Not sure if I learned a lot due to my previous studies, but was definitely good to hear known content rephrased.

The Power of Habit

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Power of Habit outlines just that: what can be achieved if you restructure your life slightly and align your daily habits to planned targets. I believe it’s from The Power of Habits that I learned about Slow Practice Will Get You There Faster, which is still on my reading list, yet sounds very promising.

The power of very small incremental improvement through the habit which is touched in Duhigg’s book reminded me continuous improvement from the Lean thinking school of Japanese Toyota engineers.

Blink

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 03 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Blink is probably one of the best books of 2014 for me and it positively surprised me. Gladwell touches on the subject of rapid assessments done in various domains of life, including doctors and scientists.

Chapter number one introduced me to the general outline of the book and Gladwell did it in a way to attract the reader. Unlike other audiobooks on which I sometimes zoned out and lost focus, his book made me pay attention. Certain fragments I listened to more than once, just to be able to increase my knowledge assimilation.

Dreaming in code

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The full title was: Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software. The book explains the story behind Chandler, Mitch Kapor’s open-source pet project in which he invested couple of millions of $$$ and it was failure.

I really expected something different from this book and I really can’t tell how I feel about it.

On one side, the structure of the book is fairly disruptive: its project commentary part, largely documentary, is good and fairly well documented and falls into the category of standard IT books reporting on project’s biography.

The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 16 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is a good summary of all management practices from previous books which I’ve read.

I haven’t learnt anything new from this group, but if you haven’t dealt with problems touching team management, I’d say this is probably the best summary so far, with all things present in one place.

Innovate like Edison

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 10 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Great introduction to the life and achievements of one of the most famous inventors ever lived.

Backstage view on Edison life and his enterprise operation is shown in this book: ideas and inventions, entrepreneurial approach to things and business dealings show Edison not only as a scientist, but as a great business leader.

Very good review on how operation of the first R&D laboratory looked like.

Authors tries to give systematic approach of innovation, but I don’t really believe that. I view the book as a collection of “good to have” advices.

Suze Orman books (9 steps, Courage..., )

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re a HFT or a Bitcoin trader, these books ARE NOT for you.

However for new to the US financial and investment system, it’s something perfect. Books are targeted toward individual finance, and they literally cover everything from child birth, through college savings to retirement and death. And are starting from death actually.

Really good summary of answers to the most popular financial questions and advices to people willing to protect their day-to-day investments.

Effective negotiating

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 28 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Effective negotiating is something I felt would be worthwhile to study, since the whole subject was relatively new to me.

Once you first meet the US car salesman you just KNOW negotiating is something you must improve.

Letting other person go first is probably the most essential thing derived from this book. Very helpful in salary negotiations.

Getting to win-win is Covey’s passage which is also forwarded to the reader in this thing.

Conversation Power

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Not that great - some obvious stuff. Nothing else.

How to Gain 2 Extra Hours a Day

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 22 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

When I first listened to this book, I started to have a bad opinion about Tracy’s books, since the advice which I have heard is basically: “In order to get more productive and earn 2 additional hours per day is basically show up at work 1 hour early and leave 1 hour late”.

But then is started to slowly make sense – he suggested making lists with priorities, a typical technique known for folks who studied from David Allen’s “Getting things done”.

Guerilla Business School

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 21 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Live recordings from countries other than Poland let me realize how different the society is. It’s very hard for me to believe such a class would have taken place in Poland.

Some parts were nice, but some were a scam. The thing where Eker encouraged people to go and lie in the stores to get free stuff was kind of low in my opinion. It seemed almost like stealing form the store owners by stretching their trust to you.

Coping with difficult people

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 14 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The author puts certain classes of personal characters into categories: sherman tanks, snipers, exploders, complainers, silent ones not participating in anything, the ones that agree with everything but don’t produce any results, bulldozers and other.

Each of them is a ticking social bomb which is going to explode in a different time.

For each of them he gives the background and the possible ways to handle the troublesome human being.

As I see it.

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

After great “How to be rich” I decided to immediately order the 2nd book by the oil magnate.

Couple of first chapters were interesting as they showed the life of the man that had it all. He explains his personal life starting from childhood through school, ending on his failures in 5 marriages.

Then he explains state of his business and the way people view and see him. Mentioned is the fact that, just like in Sam Walton’s case, “the richest man” ranking has put him in a lot of trouble..

Beautiful evindence

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 05 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

“Beautiful evidence” is similar to “Envisioning information” and felt similar in terms of style of writing, as well as the content itself. The books is good to go through.

Not sure if it’s me only or it’s the true in general, but once again I’ve found Tufte’s comments pretty hard to understand due to his language used. It’s very professorial and overly complex, thus making the content sometimes hard to understand.

Envisioning information

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Edward Tufte’s books were on my TODO for 2 years now (I got the 4 pack from somebody who apparently participated in the tutorial), but haven’t had a chance to actually read them.

Pretty difficult to start from due to the artistic vocabulary and pretty dense language, I proceed with “Envisioning information” as the first book from the collection.

Pretty amazing research has been done to create a book of that type. Examples of the art forms comes from several centuries and spun many countries.

Made in America

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This book was quite amazing. It’s funny that there are people like Sam Walton, who decided to leave some heritage and write a piece like that.

It’s probably one of the top 10 business books which I’ve read and really liked.

The book starts with Walton reaching a problematic moment of realizing he’s the no. 1 on the list of the richest American, and news rumoring about him leaving fairly modest life in Bentonville, Arkansas. Walton then backtracks his life from the beginning, by starting from the beginning - on how he was born and raised in pretty typical family, in times of great depression, where every penny counted.

Netscape Time

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Having read “The New New Thing” and later having a chance to meet Jim Clark in person, I’ve decided to consume one more book on a topic of how starting pretty niche business in the old times looked like.

Clark book is also more important to me, since it’s written by himself for the readers, so lots of things are mentioned which have not been touched in “The New New Thing”.

Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 03 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t know how many times I’ve been starting this audiobook and giving up, since the beginning of this book is pretty stiff. Some days I preferred to just drive without anything in my ears, than just starting this book. Be armored with patience! But having gotten used to the author’s tone and pace and tempo, I proceed with it.

Something is sure about this book – the story of Carnegie’s life is very different to what we see in nowadays in Silicon Valley. It was neither fast nor innovative, and book explains slow and gradual process of him becoming a steel magnate.

Brian Tracy books...

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Not too much will be put here.

I decided to give Brian Tracy’s book a try, and I’m a little bit disappointed. Looks like Tracy did what Knuth did for computer science: collected everything in the one place and brought several contributions.

Most of the stuff in Tracy’s books is a collection of examples and quotes from other authors like Napoleon Hill or Earl Nightingale.

I picked stuff related with saving time and managing your time efficiently. First was basically “work more, wake up early, go home late” type of advise. The 2nd was “Getting things done”.

Mental toughness training

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 15 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

“Mental Toughness Training”, just like its subtitle says, is a guide to achieving ideal performance at will.

Ever wondered what top golf or training players feel when they’re challenged with a need of winning this last match? Or hitting the last ball?

This book gives good overview how people train themselves to achieve that.

It was fairly interesting – good catch for a foggy day.

The Millionaire Mind

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Slightly updated version of the previous masterpiece.

My understanding from the book is that Stanley assisted by his friend picked 3000 households with net worth in range of $1M–$10M and got about 750 replies. Among them very pretty interesting notes..

..on how people from the group get their shoes repaired, instead of thrown away.

Some pretty interesting obvious stuff is mentioned in this book. For example: how a gentleman with no college made a very obvious statement: what sense does it make to enter a business with a lot of competition? Little. He entered niche business: selling used truck car parts. Sevenfold profit on each of the part.

Jack - Straight from the Gut

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 14 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

U la la. Weird feeling that is when content you’re hearing in the very moment sounds familiar. The previous lecture about General Electric entitled “Winning” I believed filled me in with enough details, and wanted to stop listening. But I persisted and ended up being happy about it.

Some content present in this book didn’t show up in “Winning” and is actually totally new content. After which I reminded myself that’s the autobiography of Jack Welch.

MicroISV

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 10 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

MicroISV was on Joel Spolsky MBA list, which I basically follow in my reading. Nifty nice little book from Welsh about point of having your own small place in the universe; you small mill for constructing software and hopefully having customers for it.

Not a big fan of a books of that kind, however good review of software testing software was done in this book. AutomatedQA is something pretty interesting–I was told by a friend of mine such a software doesn’t exist, and here it is.

Long Walk to Freedom

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 04 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Haven’t spent too much time reading anything from outside of the business world lately, but decided to break the bad habit. I picked “Long Walk To Freedom”, since it was present on “50 success classics” which somehow showed up on my list.

Pretty impressive story of Mandela’s life and his presence in South Africa.

Other day friend of mine Jonathan had said 50cent has been shot 9 times, and is an donor to charity. Don’t get me wrong – Jonathan is as far from being a genius as I am, however he also asked crucial questions: “What can put a guy who was shot 9 times down? What are you going to tell him to make him scared?”

The Power of Less

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Leo’s book I really enjoyed. I’m not alone in terms of trying to simplify things around.

There’s SO many approaches.

If you’re ever seen me couple of years ago working on my laptop, you’d see very minimalistic setup. It was FreeBSD-powered laptop, with dwm window manager, which I still think is the best window manager ever developed and with lots of work-spaces opened.

However I never really had a need to collect tasks and work on them to achieve the goal. Things for the university I tried to kept done on time as they came in to the “in basket”, so that I had a chance and time to work on my “own” thing. For other stuff, which includes mostly Open Source stuff like FreeBSD and some other minor projects, I never kept track of anything.

Learning Node

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Be warned – this is boring and technical thing

In between my Silicon Valley/business/MBA studies, which finally started to make me pretty tired, I decided to revert back to something people consider neat and hot and technically sexy. Something that can expand your skill-set to something better than “mere mortal”.

Javascript is something I explored multiple times. Typically considered a technology for the weak NOPs and “MOV r0,r0,r0”-kind of people, I felt it’s perfect for me. Javascript had lots of things which kept me mentally stimulated. I think most of the interest towards to Javascript was caused by Douglas Crockford’s publication, especially:

How to Get Rich

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS BOOK.

Felix, thanks a lot!

How to Be Rich

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

From the legend himself.. Basically very unique thing. I really wanted to get a book from first person perspective. Previous content I consumed was generated by human being of moderate wealth. People, who went on their way of setting up companies, building products and successfully selling them.

Nobody as far as I know got really wealthy. Well, maybe Larry Ellison and Jim Clarke did, but others didn’t.

Funny thing is that most of people who wrote motivational books on obtaining money and wealth never really had true riches under their control. I don’t think Napoleon Hill was really a wealthy man. We could consider him exceptionally wealthy based on number of other guys who he motivated, but that doesn’t count.

The Art of Start

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Kawasaki’s book I read long time ago, It’s a nice little booklet, relatively short, relatively packed with content.

So hey – I did what I did with other recommendations of books.

I made up a date in which I want other people think I read it, and after a short break I’m trying to tune jazzy swingy samba sound in the background and recall what did I got from the book.

Succeeding as first time manager

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This was actually pretty good!

When you’re relatively good at something, and you need to train somebody or show the person how to execute particular task, this book can be really helpful.

It especially targeted towards people being actual managers, however I must say several of the hints were pretty useful for day-to-day corporate operation.

Example:

In case of explaining complex chain of tasks which have to be executed in a given order and sequence, and they have to be done certain way in order to accomplish desired result, trick “I’m not sure if I made it clear; do you think you could rephrase with your words what you think I meant…” is perfect.

The science of getting rich

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

So the beginning reminded me “The 21 immutable laws of marketing”, where they describe that if other areas of science can have their laws, why marketing can’t? Similar to “Think and grow rich”, where the law of success is considered one of the nature’s law. Well, it’s a scam, unless you believe in it, in which case it helps you and brings your confidence up. So basically it’s up to you. Lets say this: regardless if you’re believer or not, if you assume in this heresy is 0.001% true, it’s likely to be helpful.

Everyone else must fail

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Think about me whatever you want, I don’t care – I like Larry.

Lets say this: from all the books I’ve read the common thing between all leaders is that they happen (accidentally?) business oriented.

Some people say: Microsoft is sh@t, they never figured out anything by themselves, they stole DOS from a company that code fraction of what they could really earn. They delivered stuff that wasn’t stable, nearly never work and of course – software design is wrong. APIs suck as hell.

The Master Key System

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

My brain is overflowing with content of that kind already, so nothing new here. If you’ve reach “Think and grow rich”, you’re unlikely to need this one anytime soon.

Mindset

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This book would fit pretty well with “The Talent Code” and “Talent is overrate”. Carol Dweck explains problem solving approaches and the attitude towards doing so.

Growth and fixed mindset are the main approaches for this book. Fixed approach is when a person assumes no change can be made. Or when failure labels him with a loser’s tag. Or when a single digit or event makes him feel like it’s not his thing.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Nice overview on the open source world and old times of software development.

Linux kernel is said to be the successful project, where the leader lets other people contribute the code, yet he preserves the right to question decisions and manage the development roadmap.

Raymond expresses his sympathy towards “lean” techniques of software development, versus what he calls “cathedral” development style (aka waterfall model, in the software engineering “new talk”).

Titan

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

True story behind William A. Rockefeller, known as “Devil Bill” and later, one and only: John D. Rockefeller.

Nice chunk of American history and point of view on wealth.

Very enlightening in terms of how business works. Making deals with other companies to achieve common goal was something new at the time Rockefeller started Standard Oil Company.

The thing is that Rockefeller wasn’t the first one to discover oil in Cleveland, Ohio. However he somehow managed to get his feet in a door, managed to survive and figured out a niche way of dropping prices.

Ignore Everybody

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Didn’t really know what to think about this book. Started just fine–nice story about New York City and having fun. Author described his niche habit of drawing things on the back of business cards, and how people felt it’s ridiculous.

His faith in doing something he liked and believed in was one of the advices. This is a point of view not matching the iterative, incremental model of improvement and trying to walk over and adjust. He matched whatever he wanted.

What would Google do?

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This is a pure propaganda!

Reading this thing lead to mixed feelings, however I consider the overall experience – the aftertaste – to be positive. Praising Google for pretty much every single action in the history of its operation not necessarily agrees with my vision of the Internet, but author’s points are valid.

Google made a huge impact on the relationship between a customer and the company. First of all when I started to use Google it felt more like an institution, than a company, since the main thing – the “www.google.com” – didn’t have advertisements and other annoying and troublesome usability thingies, that designers from other search shops absolutely have to add.

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

1/3rd of book is good. The rest was basically API manual pages all over the place and DOM browser hierarchies explained. I skipped those.

1/3rd I went through was decent. Javascript is like C, but slightly more extended.

Unless you buy stuff from used book outlets via Amazon I don’t recommend. Other than that: $4 well spent.

Jim Rohn's weekend leadership event

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

By all means this is a great content, which I can highly recommend. Rohn is an excellent speaker; very easily to listen and understand. Everything taught came from relatively recent materials, thus thing heard from this audiobook are likely to be easily understood by you and your kid.

Rohn has a very similar speaking style to Zig Ziglar – along the main motivational content and success “preachings”, he mentions his influences from religion and God. He also jokes quite a bit, and unlike other people, he uses pretty strong sense of humor – nearly Polish.

How to Delegate

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I picked one of my weak points and decided to see what other people can tell me about it.

Lohr’s audio program was pretty good. He mentions one of the key points of delegation, which includes: delegation as a key of making really big projects possible. The thing I typically have a problem is is delegation of stuff which I know I can do well by myself.

The bad thing is that once I’m set on the model of how given activity must be performed or I know how the method of achieving the goal should look like, it’s quite hard to convince me otherwise.

The Power of Positive Thinking

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

One of the books that I didn’t quite “get”, and thus didn’t really enjoy. The thing is that unlike other positive thinking lectures, this position is strictly religion intensive. Basically it felt like a study on God and religion, with the flavor of success in life.

Nothing bad in this approach. It just didn’t suit me. The book is too very traditional–passes only values which could be considered as “old”.

Land of Lisp

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Full title “Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time!”

Book is quite unique: written by MD.

This time I picked something that I’ve never had a chance to study, which is LISP. Lots of storytelling is going on about impact of LISP on other computer technologies.

I was inspired to look at LISP due to several reasons, but mostly because of preaching of a friend of mine, who advised me to look at it, even from the purely historical reasons. Another reason was “Hackers and Painters” and Paul Graham’s advertising of this technology. Mr McCarthy contributions too were the motivating factor.

$100 startup

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Nice take on how business can look like in nowadays world. In general book draws a picture of modern entrepreneurs, who decide to skip typical corporate culture and start earning money as independent consultants or freelancers. Mostly doing things which they love or at least are interested in.

The message is about figuring out where there’s an overlap between what you like to do or just simply love, and how this hobby and passion could get sold to other people; how other people could benefit from your knowledge and experience which you’ve gained by doing something you love?

Losing My Virginity

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Yet another WOW on my list. Absolute MUST to read for anybody interested in business. Once of the examples that real entrepreneurs can be born outside of the US, with no “from a shine-box to a millionaire” approach.

However Branson can be called Englishman with the American “dream story”.

From a dyslectic schoolboy, who happened to be very unsuccessful due to his eye problems, through the story of figuring out “Student” magazine can actually be successful, to all sort of spy-alike threads of his life.

How to stay motivated

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

It was one of my favorite audio recordings.

One of the longest too.

I didn’t know Zig Ziglar till the study of “50 prosperity classics” and “50 success classics”. His name was mentioned there, and in a pretty strange way. For me it felt like anti-advertising slogan stating Ziglar preaches old-school, Christian way of life, being a father of multiple children and orthodox beliefs. Not being sure what the “traditional” school of positive thinking is, I decided to give Ziglar’s book a try.

DEC is dead. Long live DEC

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This position was the next one in terms of hi-tech classics. DEC is the company that had put significant ground work for many further accomplishments. If there were no DEC, there would be no PDP.. computer line, and if there was no PDP, who can know if UNIX would have ever been developed?

Looks like number of accomplishments coming from DEC are mostly due to the culture and value of culture company has put into it’s core philosophy. Was DEC a geeks dream? From the introduction it looks like. Ken Olsen’s company is being described as the place, where over all costs (something that had lead DEC to a failure), the interesting technical works was put in front of everything. Customers weren’t as valued as they should be.

Talent code

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Full title: The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How.

As opposed to “Talent is overrated”, this book covered topics touching scientific parts of talent, like myelin presence, meaning, production and others.

Melanin is related with neuron training and communication, leading to better structure of human brain.

Here too information about not really recognizing something like “talent” has been confirmed.

Interestingly author shows examples of top performers, who asked about the practice revealed, there there’s absolutely no unique or extraordinary secret about they. Some of them were unable to identify anything special about their practice.

Dealers of Lightning

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Man, that’s amazing, but it’s like an N-th book on “Building a computer” story.

Probably slightly different given how special XEROX PARC and their Alto computer was.

Interesting business point was raised in the book:

“If you get a contract for $100k installation of printing services and you worry you won’t be able to keep up, it’s better to refuse the deal. Sending people to fix the printers might be more expensive than $100k and you’ll be loosing money.”

50 Success Classics

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This book was mentioned in “50 Prosperity Classics”, since it apparently was the “first one”. It’s similar in nature. Book list is slightly different. As well was used to adjust my reading plans for 2013.

On A Roll

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Since the first sentence in this book I knew it’d be a very interesting lecture. Lets say that after the first sentence I knew I must read this book no matter how bad it’ll be :)

It was great, not to say “Excellent”.

Sometimes I’m pretty surprised why people like Jonas bother to write books, but I think it’s just to try something different. And from boredom.

Book covers the entrepreneurial rising of Jonas, who looks like humble and modest, but truly exceptional individual: a kid, who knew exactly what’s going to happen in his future from the very early years of his life.

50 Prosperity Classics

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Nice overview of 50 books related to prosperity. I picked this one to target myself for 2013.

My Amazon wish-list got modified accordingly :)

The Automatic Millionaire

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Magic of regular investing seems to have been with me for a long time. Mostly due to grandmother, who said that not a single person in our family would end up well if not her habit of money saving.

According to her, if you know the power of habit, you’re saved. We knew it, but just in case we were somehow reminded Every Single Time we meet in a family circles or even in the occasional phone conversations.

Talent is overrated

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This book delivered a confirmation to my belief. If you have ever played a musical instrument, this book will also deliver very solid background on why you can only succeed in playing well by practicing regularly.

Colvin completely overturns the vision of talent. Due to his research in psychological and sociological tests done over the years it seems no such a thing as talent can be proven to exist. Thus, want it or not, “all people are born equal” seems to be the case. Blaming yourself now, huh?

Six thinking hats

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I didn’t really know what to expect out of this book, but in general my understanding is it’s a directed way for generating common voice and opinions on particular case/problem.

You lead the meeting between multiple people in a directed way (which actually can be called “blue hat”) and have people talk about the same case from different perspective.

De Bono gave an example of a group of people looking at the big, square-shaped house. Looking together at the same wall from the same perspective can lead to much better perception of the building. Often it can lead to agreements on what we see, and how we perceive certain walls. This is as opposed to having uncoordinated effort of seeing things: people alone walking around the building for 10 minutes and meeting later to discuss what they saw.

No asshole rule

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I scored 7/23 on “Are you an asshole” scale, which makes me be in a “You have to watch yourself” category.

Based on the question in the questionnaire I think some more questions would have to be added, to make this list not overly sensitive.

My company in the context of “Good companies to work for” is mentioned in this book, among few other good examples.

Several examples or harassment are actually hard to believe, since most of the American companies are “equal opportunity” places, meaning what e.g.: using racial comments in an argument with another person is strictly prohibited. Thus not sure why activities mentioned in this group sometimes become routine for some individuals (on the other hand why do equal opportunity employers hand you a “White/Black/Asian/Indian” form at the beginning of your contract?)

Peopleware

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Biggest effort in making project happen is figuring out social problems: managing people, managing expectations, figuring out issues and disagreements. Most common cause of project failure is making mistakes in one of those areas, and not areas directly related with technology.

Large portion of this book I already consumed by reading Joel Spolsky’s blog and books, and it’s not surprising, since he wrong a cover comment about the Peopleware.

Big impact on the project success or failure lies in workers conditions: quiet office space, comfortable furniture, lighting, environment and everything else relating with “relaxed” attitude towards bringing intellectual contributions.

101 Secrets of Highly Effective Speakers

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is kind of interesting book about what to do and what to avoid while speaking to a large groups of people.

Posture, appearance and diction is important to be well understood. Seeing a speaker with a suit, or in general: dress well and clean, gives much better impression than seeing somebody with a own, worn T-shirt.

Content is what matters. Every speech should have an objective, and this objective should be clearly stated to the audience.

The Goal

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Amazing take on a lean approach of business management. I didn’t believe it’ll be a valuable book, but boy.. was I wrong! Excellent position. Similar to Toyota concepts, but with so much better storyline.

Author grabbed the agile practices and wrapped them in a fictional storyline in a way that made it actually a very interesting fiction book.

Reads like a novel, and touches some social aspects of the management.

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Successful duet of Ries and Trout deliver another content together 2nd time in a row.

I do agree with other people whom I have discussed this book with: examples mentioned can be questionable. Basically it looks they wanted to confirm their theories with practice by giving examples, but the way it’s done makes you feel like: “Oh gosh. If I wanted, I could provide 100 different counter examples”.

Marketing is more like a “social engineering”, or “psychological engineering”, and I believe failures of products and companies mentioned here weren’t entirely due to what authors mentioned–failure to comply with one of the 22 laws.

The One Minute Manager

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is one of the well recognized corporate classics.

Perfect beginning, which is true, so I started to read on and continued (line by line) up until the end.

Excellent storyline with some good advises about communicating with people during projects you guys are working on.

Without rewriting portions of the book I can say lots of good points are raised in this position and I’d consider this as “MUST READ” for every single manager.

The Old New Thing

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

First time I learnt from Raymond Chen from Microsoft blog articles, and I wished there was a book with his blog entries, so that I don’t have to stare at LCD.

And there was.

Really nice walk-through around why Windows is the way it is, and how many problems Windows development team had to solve, in order to deliver a successful product.

“USB cart of death” and 20-feet long computer is something I could potentially advertise and try out in a company, as a part of daily job. We’ll see. Sounds like testing at Microsoft was a really import part of the product cycle (which only confirms stuff from “Showstopper”).

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Silicon Graphics story and why it’s not worth to take investors early!

Netscape story.

Healtheon story.

WebMD story.

All around Jim Clark and his ideas.

Excellent book. Excellent storyline. Highly recommended.

Positioning

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This book was similar to “22 laws of marketing”.

Positioning is what I’d say a strategy for creating a perception about your product in customer’s mind.

The need for positioning is backed by the huge number of new products coming from all sorts of markets.

Getting into prospect’s mind is heavily emphasized (“it’s not a battle of products, it’s a battle of perceptions”).

Interesting strategy of using a competitors position to re-position yourself is explained (“We try harder” case). This is stuff that I never really paid attention to.

Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Dean of usability so impressed me with his https://www.useit.com/, that I decided to read his books. After I was happy with “Design of everyday things”, I decided to stick to his usability suggestions. I couldn’t find any book about application design, but since modern applications are likely to be done through the browser anyway, I decided to stick to his books about web pages.

This book went through some designs and explained in a great detail, what is done wrongly, and what could be improved.

HDL Chip Design

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is the best book so far from all books I’ve seen about Verilog.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s “just OK” compare to some computer programming books out there, but in terms of digital design, I can recommend it.

This book showed me direct relationship between the Verilog syntax and actual resulting circuit in the device.

If you have a problem mapping if and else and ternary operators to the hardware, I recommend this book to you.

Winning

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

High “OMG” factor for me. Price of the book to knowledge “sold” ratio is very high here.

General Electric, or maybe rather Edison General Electric, is a result of successful entrepreneurial skills of Thomas Edison. Given this links to the whole Hill, Ford, Schwab chain, I just couldn’t resist from reading that one.

Welch, in his 20-year CEO career at GE experienced pretty much all possible cases of business success/failure. Starting from needing to close facilities, to drop businesses and stay with only the successful one, to figuring out solutions in crisis situations.

The Field

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I somehow didn’t like this one. I think author is wrong and the fact that people driving in the same and saying the same thing is just a beauty of randomness, and not the result of communicating subconsciously.

I liked some ideas in the sense I liked but refused to accept Hill’s claim that “Law of Success” is the law of nature. I just don’t believe in things like that.

Rich Dad Poor Dad

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Full title is “Rich Dad Poor Dad: What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!”

I think it was one of the first pieces about collecting wealth that I’ve read. Typically it’s relatively boring, and few authors can dress useful content in a decent storyline. Kiyosaki managed to succeed.

Narrator introduces the whole thing as having the best friend, and using his father’s advise for proceeding with business approach. Rich Dad.

Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I didn’t like this one at the beginning, since it sounds like a book written by a salesperson, but … I forced myself to finish. Conclusion: good study on sales and selling and marketing.

Then I learned all of his books at least once were on top #1 of Amazon.com, and…

I confess: I went through while “Little book..” series, including “Gold” and “Green”, as well as “Sales bible”.

The general message is: as a salesman, you’ll have to work your ass off for being truly successful.

Starting Forth

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

One of the technical classics, which I have promised myself to read.

This book is about concepts of Forth programming and underlying stack machines.

If you have ever wondered how early chips could still achieve speed and perform complex tasks with extremely tight memory limits, this book is for you.

Also, this book serves like a nice introduction to the stack concepts. If you’ve ever wondered how PUSH, POP and couple of others can get glued together to serve useful functions, you’ll find it here.

The E-Myth Revisited

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Wow!

Full title is “E-myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It” and let me tell ya, oh boy, oh boy. He really meant it!

This is absolutely truly magnificent view on the meaning of your own business. This is a true black hat for those, who think that thanks to the skill of doing something on a decent level, they can grow to be a business owner.

Microserfs

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I had a mixed feelings about this one. It described strange culture of Microsoft and their corporate environment. I can assume some stuff changed till now (2012), but I wonder how much is preserved.

My personal experiences shows that the most technically skilled people are just normal, not “freaky”, and they have normal life and families.

Of course there’s nothing wrong in spending 20 hours straight trying to figure out technical problem in your source code. However when it’s your job’s habit, it’s less fun

The Anatomy of Buzz

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

How the word spreads.

You work on one thing, you don’t tell too many people about it. You get an e-mail about this thing and you wonder: how is that possible ?

This book shows numerous of cases like that. It does explain why people form networks and how knowledge about products flow through the networks.

Ever heard of Derek Sivers? Ever heard how his CD-Baby business kept growing? This is an exact explanation of the whole phenomenon.

Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Short, little, geeky story about Linus and Linux, copyrights and ownership, coding, software culture and others like that.

This book met my expectations and delivered good outline on the history of Linux development.

The thing which I didn’t know before was that Linus stole MINIX mailing lists and that he was doing release announcements there.

The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Being over-ambitious is the worst of all sin. I promised myself to seek for recommendations for good books and stick to them and listen to nobody’s rules and consume books one at a time. I forced myself to not switch between book to book, even though book doesn’t seem to be a perfect match with my interests right away.

Most of the books which got recommended to me were very interesting. However, listening through “Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” was like a walk through hell, specially that in one third of the book I just couldn’t understand who the Phaedrus is. Even though pretty obvious to some, I just didn’t grasp it first time.

The Tipping Point

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Full title: “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference”

Interesting take on spreading epidemies of all sorts.

This is actually about word-to-mouth communications between connectors (people) and mavens (information hubs).

Epidemy of hush puppies is explained here too.

Idea of a new person breaking new grounds and doing something other people don’t consider to be an established standard is explained.

Phenomenon of a broken windows: start preventing small crimes in order to prevent big crimes.

Rework

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I highly recommend you skip this book, since I want to be ahead of you.

SKIP IT, PLEASE.

Guys from https://37signals.com – bows!

Getting things done

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This book is, and will be for a long time my number ONE in improving how I function. Surprisingly, I learned about this books from my job, which is uncommon, since it’s a rare to hear book recommendation in between cuboids.

David Allen gives an interesting perspective on the human mind, which apparently sees absolutely no difference between accomplishing huge goals (buy a house) and small goals (make laundry). And minds keeps being occupied by these plans till they get done. Mind also burns energy from you while doing so, so the more tasks you queue in your mind, the more tired and frustrated you tend to be.

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“How to Win…” I got since it was just undeniably one of the most popular American classics, known even by people who don’t read books.

“How to stop worrying and start living” followed, since its title struck me as odd. I expected I won’t be able to handle this book and will stop at some point.

It was actually pretty good. Nothing special, but acceptable.

I write this review after some after of actually going through the book, however I know I often come back to “The Law of Averages” for assessing risk, as well as to stories mentioned at the end of the book. This little 300-page piece helped me a bit with driving. Driving a car in the US, which is outside of my comfort zone, has fallen into categories of my worries, but according to these (oh well, probably faked) examples, worrying is common.

How to win friends and influence people

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

There is a lot of hardcore technical books on my shelf, but before I’ll grab them and study more chip design and other geeky stuff, I decided to start pruning the queue of my “to read” list from something more lightweight.

Also, I believe I’ll need to read more about effective communication skills and more about what is/isn’t considered inappropriate while replying to e-mails and text messages, and this book somehow felt into this plan.

Don't make me think

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

After I finished:

The Design of Everyday Things

I went for:

Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition

And this is how link “Blog” from the left side of this page points to the page entitled “Blog”, instead of “Recent blog entries”.

Really good for people with “Even I would have done this page a bit better”…

The Millionaire Next Door

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Full title “The Millionaire Next Door : The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy”

This is basically a mix of psychology, sociology, economy and business. I expected beginning will only be interesting, but this book positively surprised me. This book is an amazing chunk of research on social and material relationships among wealth Americans.

By wealthy people authors consider $1M–$10M of accumulated wealth. Study conducted over several years (since 1980). Book was published 1996, however the version I listened to referred to 2005 too, so it was likely an updated edition.

Anything you want

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

About Derek I learnt by accident.

Sort of.

After reading Spolsky’s blog and his recommendation of doing some writing on the side as a next step in boosting your communication skills, I came up with an idea for making my own page, where I could write this and that.

I knew little about blogs, so I Googled this and that, and found “Technical Blogging”:

How to move mount Fuji

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

…or Shockey Semiconductor and hiring smart people

Interesting feeling it is when you’re reading about places where significant accomplishments had happened before you’ve been born. And especially when you do it while sitting in one of these well-known places.

I started reading “How to move Mount Fuji” and actually this book positively surprised me. I expected only questions and reasoning on how recruiters think, but encountered a pretty big chunk of history of Silicon Valley and the background behind it after all. Lewis Terman’s craziness of IQ testing, Shockey’s genius and his magic team of 8; Fairchild Semiconductor and others.

The Best Software Writing I

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This time Joel acted as a art connoisseur, who picked the best miniature art forms and glued them together and commented on.

Ken Arnold’s “Style is substance” has so many good ideas, that I felt like I could have written this chapter myself (joking – I just really always wanted to have C-like-Python, where C code would preserve it’s syntax, but there “\t” and " " wouldn’t be neutral).

Raymond’s Chen “Why not to block apps that rely on undocumented behavior” pushed me to get back to his Microsoft blog and ordering his book “The Old New Thing”.

The Strangest Secret

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is one of the most influential books that I recommend to people. Earl Nightingale is probably right after Napoleon Hill on the success preachings ladder.

I listened to this one and I admit it was a pleasant experience.

Probably the most effective and powerful content I’ve injected myself.

Interestingly, this content was broadcasted in the US radio in 60’s. Being an excellent speaker let him to deliver the content in a very attractive form. Just like with Hill, falling asleep with Nightingale’s speeches isn’t possible.

Design of everyday things

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Boy ooohhh boy! Do I get frustrated by design of some objects of my daily use! No longer do I feel like a source of problem when encountering a difficulty with usage of things supposedly being trivial to use. No more!

I complained publicly about various things, including Opera browser and my bank’s Internet portal, however I’ve always felt bad about it (“Hm.. They have dozens of people working on that with thousands of data points gathered by statistical analysis – since nobody else complains, I must be the stupid one”).

Getting to Yes

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“Getting to Yes–Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In”

This is something which I think Robert Watson of FreeBSD “Hall Of Fame” is the master of. I remember what attracted me to FreeBSD was mostly written by Robert. Even stuff which wasn’t technical seemed to make so much sense..

So the thing in arguments is to not try to convince each about each other’s point of view, which typically is pointless, but to find common goal and work your way to achieve it. This is explained as “not bargaining about positions”.

More Joel on Software

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

No worse than the predecessor, this book is a mandatory item for everybody related to the hi-tech world in any way.

You’ll find hints, tips&tricks and dark secrets in the areas of hiring, project management, software engineering as well as marketing and selling your products.

Highly recommended.

The Lean Startup

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 24 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The thing is that IMVU’s idea was one of the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. But it’s only because I don’t buy ideas with virtual reality. I’m a retarded alien who just enjoys fresh air and nature. So … I expected this book will be about absolute failure.

And to some sense, it was. But not entirely.

After this lecture, I think I understand the lean business process more..

Joel on Software

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

U la la. Just read. Simply read and enjoy. I think this is number #1 in terms of “what changed my approach to software engineering”.

In order to write this review, I’d have to simply rewrite this book with my own words, since pretty much everything there shows you real-world approach on writing and selling your products, and not only.

MUST HAVE for everybody seriously thinking about making software.

Showstopper!

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“Your ass is grass, and I’m a lawnmower”

“I’ll walk through your wall”

This book was really educational. Showing Windows NT development from the backstage is something I really enjoyed.

The whole thing is actually a biography of Dave Cutler, ex-DEC software type, who was brought to Microsoft to architect “Next-Technology” system.

Designed from scratch, was considered one of the biggest software project of that kind back then.

The thing that interested me ware software engineering practices, and I think I wasn’t disappointed with this book.

Hackers and painters

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’m catching up with a list of computer classics and reading Graham’s Hackers and painters

I really expected this book will be about bearded guys arguing about Linux vs GNU/Linux and about how we all eat in front of the LCD screens, bend our necks over laptops with USB flashlights etc..

Books positively surprised me

Really nice take on business and technology. Mix of things in about right proportions.

This book is a statement of “Start small” and “growing business”.

The 7 habits of highly effective people

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Covey’s classic was well-known around my company. Looks like at some point in time this book was handed to people. Some of them claimed they were forced to read it.

I think “renegotiating agreement” is something that is often heard in a big Silicon Valley corporations, and which I think comes straight from this book.

I’m pretty sure “managing expectations” also has its roots here.

Put first things first.

Not sure if it appeared in the written version of the book, but audiobook had an excellent “Green and clean” essay presented. Very nice.

iCON

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

NOTE This review reads quite funny now, 4 years after I originally wrote it. Since then I’ve moved to Apple ecosystem and I’m quite happy because of it.

Not being Apple practitioner didn’t stop me from reading about Apple and Steve Jobs:

Some conclusions. Consistent project vision and design. Have you ever read Mythical man-month? I see an reverse analogy between S/360 and Apple – having a leader with a vision of a product line is important. It’s sometimes interesting how really big products can succeed when being designed by one person. The most I impressed was by Inside AS/400 which apparently was designed by a single person.

The Toyota Way

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is one of the most influential books in my life, honestly speaking.

Concept of lean manufacturing can be spread to pretty much anything, and works very, very well.

This changed my view of my work on computers and electronics and life. I try to buy food products and snack more frequently, in smaller quantities.

Notion of process is basically something that I think makes software and hardware successful. I map Toyota’s process to “Joel’s Test” and see it’s not easily met. Having a good flow is very hard, and most companies don’t have that.

The Soul Of A New Machine

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Reading about good old days is something I enjoy in my free time. Getting to know history of computer is something that compensates my general lack of history knowledge, I believe. Not only does the history help you prevent mistakes from the past, but it also inspires to reuse some of the ideas of early giants.

“The Soul Of A New Machine” I found on 2010 on the shelves of unowned books in my company, but I didn’t really have a motivation to read it back then. I saved a title on my Amazon Wishlist.

Think and Grow Rich

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

CLASSIC.

Secret

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is where the story with “new school” Hill-alike books started. This book wouldn’t have been such a big and significant step on my reading list, however:

it was recommended to me by my mother, who got it by accident and suggested I may like it
it was first book of that kind that I’ve read
in the Polish edition of this book a lot of other authors of similar books were mentioned…

So the book talks about what I could now call “typical positive thinking” methodology, meaning: motivation and habit of trying to achieve your precisely stated goal is all there is to be successful.