Some super quick book notes

A lot of people have gotten to this page looking for help with Quickbooks. Believe me, this is the last place you should be looking help with accounting software! I recommend trying Amazon instead.

Ever since I wrote my Amazon SLC Library Lookup script, I've been consuming books at a much higher rate than normal. Here are a couple of thoughts about some of the more recent books I've finished.

Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything - I had been wanting to read this for a while, and by the time I actually got around to reading it, the book had built up a tremendous amount of praise. Yet somehow this book is still underrated. The chapter about why crack dealers live with their mothers was particularly exciting.

Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers - Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's book about corporate blogging was set up in my mind to be Cluetrain Part 2. Thankfully it wasn't. By the end I found myself almost completely agreeing with their belief that nearly any business can benefit from blogging. Highly recommended if you thought corporate blogging was only for tech companies like I did.

The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture - This is a lot less about Google than I thought, and about 100x more stimulating than a book about Search has any right to be. I think The Search is best described as an authoritative history of the entire internet, the majority of which has been shaped by Google. Interestingly I came away from this book with a bit of a funny taste in my mouth that has only gotten stronger over the past few months.

The Republic of Tea : Letters to a Young Zentrepreneur - Essentially a large collection of faxes between a passionate, young entrepeneur and his equally passionate senior partners about the starting of a tea company in the early '90s. This is a really fascinating look at the birth of a company from the inside, without the warm nostalgia of retrospect. This book gave me about a billion ideas for my side project / pipe dream web app. Some of which I will probably discuss here soon.

Getting Real - I just finished this one tonight. It's a really quick read, especially if you have been reading the 37signals blog for the past year or so. Even so, there is value in reading it straight through and getting "the vision" and stuff. I waver on being a big 37signals fan and finding them a bit tiresome, but the book stays reasonably grounded. I think this is the perfect little book to give to the boss who doesn't really get it.

Posted by Mark Allen on Thursday, March 9, 2006 Comments (1)