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.

Book Review: Harnessing Hibernate

Harnessing Hibernate is the latest in a series of books I got recently to review (I have been a little too busy to read through all of them...). The book caught my interest right away since I have used Hibernate on a pretty big enterprise project a while ago and was involved in the solving of some performance issues faced by another large project due to their mishandling of some Hibernate code.

I like how Hibernate makes building data services a cinch - but more often than not, it worries me that a lot of people don't really understand Hibernate the way they need to before they can use it in large-scale applications with emphasis on scalability and performance. Understanding what goes on under the hood of Hibernate fetches goes a long way in avoiding silly mistakes like loading a set of large, linked objects into the memory when you probably needed just the top-level object or a couple of properties.

Also, a lot of books seem to focus on working code and simple samples - prototypes that work, but are ultimately not much of use in a real-world situation. I consider it a strength of this book that it doesn't take the readers for granted. The authors do a great job of explaining all concepts involved in getting a Hibernate application to run - including build tools like Maven. It has clearly defined examples, possible errors and ways to get around the errors. Of course, that doesn't mean there isn't much here for experienced developers - there are some really neat tips and tricks that might go over the heads of those that are not advanced enough to understand the concepts.

I would recommend this book readily whether you are a beginner looking to learn Hibernate or an advanced devloper hoping to refresh their knowledge or find something they might have missed before.

Liveblogging the Web 2.0 Expo

In case you have not been able to make it to O'Reilly's Web 2.0 expo in New York (like me), you can still follow along from this live blogging effort.

O'Reilly themselves have provided a few more resources to read along about the goings on...
O'Reilly's Expo Blog
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