Books to buy

Today I had a day of training; the course was a training course for peers that have been elevated to the lofty ranks of middle-management and talked about how to manage "sucessful projects". It was quite a good day and the group of co-middle-managers were all enthusiastic and keen in their participation. I actually like days such as these because you get to excercise your brain and challenge some core beliefs/assumptions. My favourite part was at the beginning when we each had to talk about our favourite "fantasy"; nearly all people talked about financial freedom or sensual holidays in the Greek Isles - not me! I thought that I'd establish my geek-cred early by talking about my dream of building a time machine :-)

Anyways, during lunch I wandered off to Borders bookstore in the hope that I might catch a chapter or two of Dino Esposito's latest thriller - - I couldn't find it but I did manage to pull up a couch and read from the following 2 books

Firstly, the James Avery book looks like a must have for anybody doing ASP.NET development. There's an absolute wealth of information in there! James tried to get me to look at it while we were in the MS Store in Redmond recently but, at the time we couldn't find it there - pity!

The other book - Death March - looks awesome. I'm sure that every developer has been on a Death March at some stage - not nice eh? This book talks a lot about how to build effective teams and how to ensure that your next project doesn't end up a "Death March". From what I saw it looked like a great read.