Book Review: Beautiful Teams

Once in a while you read a book that is such great reading that you forget it is serving as a valuable teaching tool at the same time - "Beautiful Teams" by Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene is one such book I had an opportunity to read.

Any software engineer with any amount of professional experience has been part of a development team - sometimes good, sometimes bad. We have all been in situations where we have had to work with difficult people under difficult situations. This book is a great compendium of several such stories - people working with other people under difficult circumstances - sometimes making things work and sometimes failing spectacularly.

You come away with a new appreciation for the teams - the difficult people and the people who can make them work - after reading about the various experiances. It is amazing how many of my own project teams I was reminded of while I was reading this book - beautiful teams and ugly teams that won beautifully. This is a must-read book for team members and leaders. I recommend this especially for those who want to be in leadership positions and need new ideas about making teams work. You will find it hard to put this down once you start reading.