Non-fiction books you really should read

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I read a lot of books, mostly fiction. That said, occassionally I come across a non-fiction book that genuinely changes how I think about something. In general I can tell those books a while later, because they're the ones I keep referring people to over and over. So here's a list of the non-fiction books I've read since I started keeping records that I think have changed how I think about the world: The Man Who Broke Capitalism: companies should exist for more than mergely hitting quarterly earnings goals -- they should serve their shareholders, but also their employees and the communities they operate in. In return, long term growth is more likely than with a short sighted approach. The Innovators Dilemma: understanding the behaviour of companies in established markets and how disruption occurs changed how I thought about many of the companies I've worked for. Chip War: the history of the semiconductor industry and its globalization was both interesting and informative about how interconnected our global economy has become. Cult of the Dead Cow: how a group of teenagers looking for fun "hacks" accidentally changed an entire industry's attitude towards responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities. The Mythical Man-Month: genuinely…

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Trying out the Apress e-book system

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Full disclosure: I am currently writing a book for Apress. As an Apress author Apress asked me to check out the Apress e-book online catalog thingie. They threw in a free e-book as an incentive, so I thought I should give it a try. I've done a fair few book reviews for AUUG / Woodslane over the last couple of years, so it seemed like a good idea to look further into this e-book thing anyway. Especially as I have a garage full of books that I occasionally need as references, but don't have the space to store in the house, especially with two small kids who like to draw in books around. So, I picked a book in their online catalog, and said I'd like to buy it. I entered the discount code, and was good to go until they noticed that I didn't have an online account in their system. So, I had to stop my "purchase" and make one. Which meant that my place was lost in the purchase, as I had to wait for a confirmation email to arrive, and then click on a link in that email which didn't have the stage I was up…

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Tipping point: windscreen washers

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Ian comments on being accosted by a window washer in the CBD, and therefore forces my hand in commenting on this part of my current reading book, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. In the section in cleaning up crime in New York during the early 1990's, I was interested to note that one of the big things they did to clean up crime in the city was have the police stop people from standing on street corners insisting on washing people's wind screens. This was basically part of the broken windows philosophy of crime control. People apparently behave in a different way on a dirty street with lots of broken windows than they do in a nicer part of town. So, how do you stop crime? Fix the broken windows. (Hey, it worked in New York.) Ian, worse than losing $2, you were the victim of the leading edge of a rising tidal wave of crime. Soon wild gangs will be roaming the streets. [tags: crime windscreen washer]

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Second day, and already behind

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Herm. I'm having a go at helping Jeremy review his book. Partially because of timezone differences and partially because of giving a talk on my Blosxom blogging engine at a users group last night I'm already a little behind. Time to knuckle down and do some serious reading me thinks. [tags:]

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Tipping Point: Gaetan Dugas, the AIDS patient zero

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Page 21 of The Tipping Point mentions Gaetan Dugas, the so-called AIDS patient zero: "...the French-Canadian flight attendant, who claimed to have 2,500 sexual partners in North America, and who was linked to at least 40 of the earliest cases of AIDS in California and New York..." Assuming this time line of the AIDS epidemic is to be believed, I'm surprised that the transition from monkey to human happened in 1930 (ish). That's about four decades earlier than I had assumed. I might follow that thread a little more in a separate post. AIDS was a traumatic experience as a child growing up in the very late 1970s, and through out the 1980s. I definitely remember being a quite scared 10 year old when the grim reaper advert campaign came to air. It rather sounds to me like Gaetan has some fairly serious psychological problems. Now, I'm not judgemental of the fact that he liked to shag people, but surely there is a reasonable limit that should be imposed on the number of partners you should have at any one time, even without imposing my Christian perspective on it all. Perhaps I'm also tainted by having grown up in a…

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