Software Books

I bought the first edition of this book called Programming Windows Presentation Foundation (AKA Avalon) at the PDC in 2005 and read it completely on the plane home.

When I heard the second edition was released I didn't think much would have changed, but this is even better than the first edition. It's twice as big and covers all major (and not so major) topics in WPF (inc. an introduction to 3D and Silverlight).

I think this book will proof to be for WPF what Programming Windows, Fifth Edition is for WIN32 programming.

This book is the most in depth resource into WPF i have seen. And not just that, it gets to the good stuff that you'll actually use in your code and not just filler or lists of properties that you can get from intelisense. The examples are extremely useful.

The other benefit of this book is that it doesn't just tell you how to do things, but why. This is incredibly helpful in finding the best solution to your specific problem.

Thanks guys! great book!
Ralph

I say to ignore those reviews because they do not refer to this book. This is the second edition published August 28, 2007 with 863 pages. Those reviews are based off of the first edition published nearly two years before (September 12, 2005) and with only 447 pages.

Using Amazon's 'Search inside this book' takes you to the 2005 edition also. That shows only 10 chapters while this edition has 17. Most of the negative comments from the 2 and 3 star reviewers seem to have been resolved.

The biggest strength of this book is that it focus on using WPF programatically, not just laying out XAML. This is extremely useful if you are writing an application for 3D data visualization or a database driven application. You get to learn to create event handlers, generate meshes... all programmatically. I also believe that this book is great, not just as a learning tool, but as a reference guide. It is the most comprehensive book on the subject and a must for the aspiring WPF developer.

If you just want to focus on XAML, however, I will have to recommend "Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed" by Adam Nathan.

As a software developer I've written tons of production-level code for many companies including Rockwell Automation, Compuware, MS.
And I found this book to be too shallow for a technical person like me.

[One can save money by simply downloading WPF SDK samples and learning them]

Can one design and implement a better than WPF framework after reading this book? Obviously not!

No wonder, the authors never developed significant portions of any known product/framework!

Also, my e-mail exchange with C. Sells indicates that he himself doesn't really understand WPF in depth.
(BTW, as a MS employee he has luxury of having access to WPF source code and symbols - he obviously didn't bother to do so)

Just a few examples:
-- Managed/Unmanaged transition, e.g. the MIL stuff
-- Lack of understanding the WPF control model
-- Lack of understanding the WPF text model
-- Just like in any other *shallow WPF book* [are there deep WPF books out there?] authors make no effort to scrutinize the existing framework (WPF). [Which is definitely far from being clean and nice]
-- WPF "GDI-free" claims are nonsense since WPF uses User32 and User32 and Gdi32 libs are tightly coupled.

This book is pretty good for beginners. I have recently started teaching myself html and I was able to handle most of the things I was reading about without too much trouble. There were a couple of times I really needed to pause and go back and read it again. Then maybe I could put it together. Only one or two times did I just give up with total frustration. All in all it's a great handbook and I am sure I will get it all someday!

The text was easy to read and gave a great number of examples but lacked any questions or problems at the end of each chapter.

A very good book if you would like to understand how HTML works

I've been doing HTML work on and off for the last 5-6 years. This book is full of great examples for beginners or more advanced users who just forgot how to do something. You won't regret owning this book.

Although the author gives some superfials explanations on JavaScript, CGI & DHTML, this book offers and comprehensive and fairly complete explanation on HTML.
Higly recommended for those willing to learn and master HTML.

I graduated from the University of Redlands (California) with a Bachelor of Science in Information Systems degree a few years ago. Many of the textbooks I used were not very enlightening - I suffered through using them and immediately took them back to the bookstore for resale. This wasn't so with the CREATING COOL HTML 4 book. I use this as a reference book now.

One of the classes I took included a web design portion. How fun to create web pages that were exciting and not boring. It was easily accomplished using this book as a guide but someone who knows nothing about HTML design could easily use this and create.

The chapters are broken down from the basics to intermediate items. The author, Dave Taylor, explains exactly what entails a web page, what a URL is, basic html, graphics, tables, links, pointers, image maps, and other advanced designs.

Now many technical books are dry to read and often times leave the non-die-hard techies wondering what was just said. Not true with Taylor. He gets everyone to understand html - those creating their first web page to those who want to do more, those that want pizzazz on their pages.
If you're not a beginner, you may want to skip the chapters in which Taylor explains to new users about Web pages, how browsers work, what URLs are, and other basic concepts. (But it can be a good refresher for those who haven't designed web pages in a while). Next he expands into basic HTML, fonts, text styles, and gets the reader to understand the making of lists, special characters, pointers, and links. Next comes the explanation of graphics and the creation of tables and frames. But my favorite part is next - chapters on advanced items like background, marquees, image maps, JavaScript, forms, plug-ins, Dynamic HTML, style sheets, and much more.
Examples shown in the book are easy to follow and let the reader completely understand what the code does and how it will look on a web page. Nothing in CREATING COOL HTML PAGES is overwhelming and will let everyone create a web page of which they can be proud. I'm a computer programmer, and still use this as a reference. In fact, it's one of the most borrowed books in our office! This book is highly recommended for any level of html programmer.

When I was 9 years old I got my first pair of glasses and was amazed by the detail and clarity of my new vision. What was once green blobs atop brown cylinders became gorgeous, complex trees in their full, leafy glory. In a similar way, thanks to Nee, I see the details and wholeness of God's greatest gift to us, His Son.

Watchman Nee makes Paul's Letter to the Romans accessible and applicable. I have been a Christian for many years and participated in many Bible/Christian studies. Nevertheless, I did not grasp the fullness of the Cross. The Normal Christian Life explains in everyday terms the many benefits of Christ's sacrifice for us and how to walk in Him. Please read this book and share it with others. It is a life refiner.

Watchman Nee is one of my favorites. This is for the intermediate Christian. Nee takes us through the book of Romans. Not like every other study that is out there. One needs to read this to advance. Many People don't like Nee but I find him a great teacher for those who are willing to get off of the milk of Christianinty and start cutting their teeth on some meat! Worth the money. Great for an indepth Bible study guide.

Avoid the May 29, 2008 Paperback, buy the Mass Market Paperback. A poor edition of a classic book, most of the notes were removed, and some explanations aren't there either, the book has been mutilated.

I've never heard anyone teach some of the things in this book but I've seen glimpses of them myself in my own scripture study. This book is simply life-transforming! I'm almost done with my first read thru the book and plan on immediately re-reading it.

Here is another classic on how the biblical Christian should live "IN" Christ from a Chinese pastor and missionary who spent many years and died for his faith in prison. One of his most endearing and well-known chapters is on how God's Grace triumphs over Law in Romans 7. The story of the one woman and two husbands is as timeless and insightful as it is biblical. The entire chapter is full of insights into our new position in Christ, and the believer's relationship to the Law.

In the first chapter, The Blood of Christ, Nee starts out with the question, "What is the normal Christian life? He gives us the Apostle Paul's answer in Galatians 2:20, "It is no longer I, but Christ." He summarizes it this way, "I live no longer, but Christ lives His life in me." What follows throughout the rest of the book is a superb biblical study on how the Christian should and can live victoriously In Christ. As a missionary to Africa, I have seen how important it is for converts from a syncretism of animism and Islam to truly realize their new position in Christ. This teaching, empowered by the Holy Spirit, is their only means of throwing off the chains of fear and darkness that have imprisoned them. Yet, this applies to all believers the world over.

From the back cover of my 1977 edition:
"Watchman Nee (1903 - 1972) is remembered for his leadership of an indigenous church movement in China as well as for the books that continue to enrich Christians throughout the world. Beginning in the 1930s, he helped establish local churches in China that were completely independent of foreign missionary organizations and were used to bring many into the kingdom of God. From them came many of the house churches that continued a faithful witness when Western missionaries were forced to leave the country. Arrested in 1952 and found guilty of a large number of false charges, Watchman Nee was imprisoned until his death in 1972."

this book is "MUST HAVE" Perl book!
It gives you great idea to simply your code and algorithm.

I'm fairly new to Perl (but not to programming) and this book is great. I really like the format of the code examples, and there's a lot of wisdom here on writing good, idiomatic Perl.

This book shows you some efficient and interesting ways of using Perl. It is very informative and I often use it when I want to see if there is a better way of doing something.

This is a good book for getting a handle on intermediate level Perl and its idiomatic uses, arranged as a series of 60 'items' -- the debt to Effective C++ is obvious. This is not a tutorial on Perl, you should at least be at the level of The Llama and ideally be somewhat acquainted with the material covered in The Alpaca, too. Although similar ground is covered in this book to the latter, I would treat this book as a way to shore up your previous knowledge, rather than learning it for the first time.

The content holds up surprisingly well for 1997. The opening chapters cover a lot of the oddities and gotchas of life with Perl, such as slicing, the various connotations of undef, a persuasive defence of $_ and where + is necessary to disambiguate. The final 'miscellany' chapter also contains useful information in a similar vein. And this also appears to be one of the first books to detail the now famous Schwartzian transform and the Orcish manoeuvre for sorting, so it has a certain historical appeal.

Equally, the chapters on debugging, references, regular expressions and object oriented programming are also pretty good. It's just that there are now several other books that cover these topics. If you only want one book in this style, Perl Best Practices bestrides the field like a colossus, being more comprehensive, and better written. Not that there's anything wrong with the writing here, it's never boring as such, but it does feel flat.

Nonetheless, Effective Perl Programming does the job it sets out to do fairly well, and I find you can never have too much help in explaining the nooks and crannies of idiomatic Perl, so this is still worth getting hold of, particularly because you can find it at an extremely reasonable price.

Well, even though I rate this book only 3 stars, I do think it belongs to the shelf of any serious Perl programmer. (Of course, don't just let it sit there; read it!) I think the emphasis here is it's useful only for the *serious* Perl person, as it contains lots of in-depth discussion on the nitty-gritty details of Perl's idiosyncratic personalities.

The reason I don't like the book as much as I thought I would is things are not explained clearly much of the time. Take the chapter on references for example. While the authors include lots of examples, the explanation of how nested references work is just confusing. Granted, this is a nasty concept to grasp, but I expected something clearer. Instead they just say "oh this looks ugly", which is not helpful. BTW, if you are pulling your hair out over references like I am, the Dumper pragma (not the dump function) is extremely helpful. (Unfortunately, it's not mentioned in this book, nor in the camel book).

Her book was the only book I got for creating a Website with Dreamweaver and Fireworks. Following her tutorials I built a fabulous Website with cascading style sheets, rollovers, the works. I was never bored or confused, and I understood the "why" and well as the "how."

I've just downloaded a trial version of Dreamweaver MX and came here specifically to get HER book on Dreamweaver MX. Sadly, she doesn't seem to have published one.

Lynda Weinman knows what she is talking about. I have learned quite a bit following her lead.

I highly recommend this book. It was an excellent learning tool for me as a beginner. The tutorials were fabulous!

I enjoyed the exercises and layout of the book. For someone who never did any web development this book is great.

I must say that Lynda is, hands down, the best instructor I've ever come across on the printed page. I've been using Dreamweaver for over two years and I learned so much from this book. The chapters and exercises were so concise, so ordered and really a lot of fun. I recommend this book whole-heartedly!

This is a good book for getting started in Pro Tools. It covers pretty much what a musician would need to know to start making songs.

The author is really good at making complex concepts and procedures understandable. She even uses a blog where she will personally answer your questions if you get stuck.

That said...
The book is using Pro Tools version 7, and because I was using Pro Tools LE 7.4, there were quite a few discrepancies between what was presented in the book, and what I had in front of me, and the reader is required to extrapolate from time to time. All this will probably be fixed if the author ever revises the book. Then she can specify exactly what version is being used.

Also, in the revision, I hope she uses XPand, the free (and extremely cool) sampler from Digidesign, and not the $600 SampleTank, which you can only try for 10 days before buying.

Another thing I think would be very beneficial to new users and should thus be included in the possible revision. is a whole section of the book on creating your own loops, right from the beginning.

Thanx Gina

Amazing book very easy to read, follow along, comprend, and a must have for quick fun beginners guide. Provides refrences to other helpful software and throughly explained how-to's.

I have never felt compelled to write a review for any product I've ever purchased, but this is different!! I've been a home recording artist since the mid-eighties. Started with a Tascam 4 track cassette recorder, then to their 8 track version and then to Yamaha's AW4416 DAW. So I have a basic understanding for recording, but was never a techie at it. All I wanted was to lay my tracks and sound down.

I recently purchased Pro Tools Mbox2. For two straight weeks I muddled through what the hell all of the drop downs boxes, buttons and options meant. The manual explains each function in technical terms, but not how each is used in the context of recording and the big picture. I wanted to return the dam thing!!

I then began looking into different books and saw the positive reviews that "Pro Tools for Musicians and Songwriters" had and thought I'd give it a try... THIS BOOK IS FRIGGIN AWESOME!!!!! I felt like the author was sitting right there with me showing me exactly what all of the features were for and how to use them. Right from the very beginning of laying your tracks down to the finish product and a whole bunch of everything else in the middle!!!

DigiDesign, should include this book with every sales of Pro Tools. It's just that good!!!! ...and now I love Pro Tools!!!

I had a difficult time understanding how to begin working with ProTools until I bought this book. It's a great step by step tutorial that works through all the basic concepts and produces a finished music composition as an end result. I refer to it often as I write and record. Now when I refer to the ProTools manual for detailed info, I have a much better grasp on what I'm reading.

I needed a book to get more out of Pro Tools; I don't want to be an engineer savant - just record my guitar and vocal tracks and add a touch of MIDI here and there.

Some books were terribly daunting, some so simple that they were of no use.

It's true - this book is laid out to work as lessons with tracks that can be downloaded from a website. But even if you're working on your own projects - the explanations here are simple enough, you should be able to apply them to your needs. Or heck, go through the lessons - if you wanna learn, put in the time.

Even without yet going through all the lessons, I've found two or three great tips that have made my mixes (and CPU usage) much improved; and for that alone it was worth the money I paid. Big clear pictures, the Table of Contents takes you where you need to go, and the author even makes herself available via her web blog, if you have a question.

A friend who has ProTools sat at my house and picked up the book and just flipped through some chapters and saw some relevant tips he took home with him to California (I'm in Utah). I'd bet he's bought a copy by now.

Will it detail every configuration of every plug-in - no. Is it "For Dummies" - no.

This is a five-star reviewed book - it's not for everybody, but if you're starting out and need some good clean answers, start here!

This book "flows" easily and it does a great job covering the meteoric rise of both Bill Gates and Microsoft. The narrative is never dull and both, the man and his company, are given a fair treatment. This book was published in 1993 and a lot of interesting stuff remains to be told. Wish the authors would team up for a sequel. This is a well written and authoritative account of Microsoft and its founder.

Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire

This book is a must-read for people who consider themselves ambitious and driven. It taught me the importance of single-minded drive and determination, coupled with a passion for the line of work one is in. IT is a tough line of work to be in - jobs could be outsourced anytime, skills become redundant quickly and there isn't the glamor or get-fabulously-rich possibility of finance or investment banking... but this book demonstrates that as long as you are passionate about what you do, there is always room at the top. Take heart from it!

This is the definitive Book about Bill Gates (and the history of Windows). It covers all the management aspects of how he drove Microsoft and how the work became his life. The man doesn't do business... He LIVES it. And this book describes it in very much detail.

The details includes how Bill "turned over" IBM... Promissing them the OS/2 under the "NT Technology" flag and how he realeased Windows 95 and killed IBM forever from the Desktop business. It also shows Gates apreciation for Older woman (and many that took him to bed). As part of this "private" package, it also explains the problems that He had with Steve Ballmer. How Ballmer was showing poor management and leadership under Gates perspective and how Ballmer got over it and made his loyalty to Gates forever.

I was more interested on the part that explains how Microsoft Windows 1.0 was developed. How disastrous the first Office was compared to the competition and how they managed to "work around" and fix it, by "coping" the competition and improving it "the Microsoft way".

Buy this if you want to know how business can be done... or be "copied".

Delightful book. Its one flaw is its addictiveness, I couldn't put it down which did cost me sleep (I'm an IT professional with an entrepreneur spirit- your results may vary).

The Microsoft/Gates biography is impeccable in its wealth of interesting details and engaging story-telling.

Bill Gates is a fantastic decision maker. He would be as successful selling water or space suits, he just happened to be at the right time in the right booming industry and pushed with his business-business mentality to the limit. Right decision after right decision, the Microsoft journey is a story that any entrepreneur should nitpick and absorb as much as possible.

Of course, his terrible capitalistic drive is a perfect subject for a discussion on morals, social responsibility and related matters, but without a doubt when it comes to maximizing outcome while playing by our economic rules, Hard Drive tells a tale of epic proportions featuring a superhero / villain that rivals the best of science fiction.

This is really a story of how Gates led Microsoft to its apex, ending in about 1992. It is well written and a good balance bewteen criticism, an explanation of the business model, and historical detail. The story is, to put it mildly, remarkable no matter what you think of MS and Gates.

While a student at Harvard in December, 1974, Bill Gates III and Paul Allen informed Ed Roberts by telephone that they had invented a BASIC computer language for the MITS Altair 8080, which was the first "personal computer" kit for hobbyists. Could they license it along with each Altair kit, Gates asked, to customers for a royalty fee? It was an audacious proposal, because not only had Gates and Allen invented no such thing, but they neither owned an Altair kit nor did they even know the technical specifications for the Intel 8080 chip. Skeptical of their claim, Roberts replied that whoever demonstrated a working BASIC would win the account: Gates and Allen were in competition, he told them, with 50 other "geeks" who already had made the same claim. Gates and Allen then hunkered down for 8 weeks to write the first BASIC for a microcomputer. The resulting "software", which immediately won over Roberts, was the first application of what would become Microsoft BASIC. Gates was 19.

As the company founders, Gates and Allen shared a vision that virtually every home and every office desk would eventually have a PC on them, all operating with their software. To run Microsoft full time, Gates dropped out of Harvard in January, 1977. Their business quickly expanded beyond the Altair as competing brands of personal computers emerged, including the Tandy from Radio Shack and the Apple II computer; they were also called upon to program BASIC into a number of other electronic devices. All along, Gates' goal was to gain market share, in effect setting the software standard for most, if not all, PC users. As a true believer who intimately knew the product, Gates was the principal salesman, while Allen concentrated on technical development.

During this formative period, Microsoft's corporate culture was established. Perhaps as a result of hiring many of his programmers straight out of university, Microsoft's offices (and later the campus in Redmond, Washington) took on the look and feel of a college campus, that is, an informal and a freewheeling intellectual atmosphere with "late hours, loud music, walls full of junk, anything goes dress, Coke, adrenaline, unbuttoned behavior." Employees tended to be very young with a programmer or engineering mentality; they designed their products for tech-savvy customers - male in their early 20s - like themselves, a kind of fellowship for computer adepts. Like Gates, they loved to play with and program electronic gadgets.

Microsoft hired the brightest programmers with demonstrated practical abilities. Employees were also expected to work extremely long hours as a team toward a common goal, not as strident individualists. Gates encouraged them to develop their entrepreneurial passions, forcefully advancing their own ideas of useful products for new markets. Overseeing it all was Gates, who gained the reputation of a harsh and challenging critic with a relentless drive for excellence, whether to beat the competition or out of fear of falling behind in such a fast-changing industry. As the sole remaining founder after Allen's departure in 1983, Gates remained deeply involved in both technical and business details as well as the general direction of company strategy. Nonetheless, as the principal revenue generators, Microsoft's product groups increasingly became the seats of decision-making power, in spite of Gates' active engagement.

At the end of 1979, Microsoft had $US 4 million in sales. Most of these revenues came from BASIC, which enabled programmers to create applications, such as word processing and accounting spread sheets. The level below BASIC and the other languages under development at Microsoft was the computer operating system, which performed the most elementary tasks required to run computers. With the prospect of providing software to IBM for the basic PC it was planning to market for a reasonable price, Gates and Allen began to acquire the rights to, and then develop, software for a computer operating system. Known later as DOS, it again set an industry standard that would enable Microsoft to efficiently develop languages and software applications in a single engineering environment rather than painstakingly customize them for a variety of incompatible operating systems. This would immensely simplify Microsoft's programming process as well as enhance its efficiency.

As Gates foresaw, this was a near-ideal position to occupy at the moment that the PC market was poised to grow explosively with the introduction of the inexpensive IBM PC, which was made of off-the-shelf components and hence easy to copy, or "clone". With the dual ownership of DOS and several major programming languages, Microsoft became one of the fastest growing companies in the world. By 1985, just prior to its IPO, on revenues of $US 140 million, Microsoft had a pre-tax profit margin of approximately 34%, no long-term debt, and cash reserves of $US 38 million. By 1987, the company surpassed Lotus to become the world's largest software vendor for PCs. Gates was on his way to become the richest man in the world, at least for a time.

However, the ownership of DOS and the programming languages would also, critics later claimed, confer an "unfair advantage" on the company. First, the Microsoft applications groups were accused to obtaining "inside information" from the operating systems group, which enabled them to design their products to function more quickly and smoothly than competitors could. Second, because each change in DOS required competitors to supply their latest products to Microsoft programmers to ensure compatibility, critics charged that this amounted to an inside peek into their strategy at the cutting edge of their capabilities. It was a symbiotic relationship that made many outside vendors - independent companies developing applications to run on Microsoft operating systems -uneasy and resentful. Third, DOS programmers were accused by rivals of inserting "hidden bugs" into the operating system in order to hinder the function of competing products, such as the Lotus spread sheet, damaging their competitive position and brand. The resulting negative publicity did a great deal of damage to the Microsoft brand, which began to be seen as the industry bully.

While Gates insisted that he had erected a "Chinese Wall" between Microsoft's applications division and its Operating System's Group, it was not enough to deter the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) from opening a probe into the company for anti-competitive practices that purportedly hurt consumers. By 1991, when the FTC probe became widely known, Microsoft controlled one-quarter of the applications market and dominated the operating systems market with Windows. There was speculation about the imminent breakup of Microsoft into separate companies for these markets, similar to the dismantlement of AT&T. For their part, defenders of Microsoft argued that it was winning because it was better and smarter, presenting its customers with superior products at bargain prices.

This a pretty much where the book stops, which badly dates it. Not only is the story of the anti-trust law suits left untold, but subsequent business developments - notably the internet - are not even mentioned. Thus, this is an excellent early history, but the reader must look elsewhere for more detail. Of the shelf of books on MS, in my opinion this is one of the best, and it was most useful to me for a research project. Recommended.

The absolutely best, most comprehensive reference for the serious fly tyer. It teaches you ALL the components of the artificial fly and 10 ways to tie each variation. No fly tyer should be without this incredible guide. Ted is the best in the business of writing about fly tying, fly fishing, equipment, etc... A consummate professional.

This is by far worth the money you pay for it. This book is mistitled however it should be the fly tier's bible. An absolute must for ANY fly tier rather they're new to the scene or been at for 50 years.

The fly tying bible! must I say more?

Very good and instructional fly tying book.
All aspects of fly tying techniques are covered and assisted with many pictures.

A must book for any fly tier. If you buy a book on fly tying this should be the one. Outstanding quality, and at Anazon price is a great buy.

As a new fly tier "The Fly Tier's Benchside Reference" has the information I was looking for. The text with the pictures makes learning new techniques fun. I would recommend this book to any one that want to learn fly tying.

Very detailed guide for how to use you D40x camera. It gives you information easy to follow for beginners as well as pros. It has helped me to know some short cuts that are excellent for when you are in hurry to take that great pic.

Great book for using your D40. The Dummies book for D40 is better, but this book is worth it as second book.

This is WAY better than the 'manual' that comes with the D40. In my humble opinion, this should be included in the box!!

If you purchase a Nikon D40/D40X you will want to be certain to purchase this book too...especially if is the first time you have used a SLR camera and are totally green to the photography lingo!!

This book explains it without making you feel like you are being talked down to!!

This is the perfect Nikon D40/D40x guide for anyone unfamiliar with DSLRs. I had a somewhat basic understanding of my D40's controls before I bought this book and reading it has made such a difference in my pictures. Highly reccommended!

This is an excellent piece of work, very thoughtfully organized and well written. Nikon should distribute a copy of this book along with the camera, instead of their user manual.
I ordered a copy as soon as I ordered my Nikon D40. The book came first so I had some time to read before I got my hands on the camera. The Nikon user manual never got a chance to open. This will be the best investment you make besides the D40 itself. When you look at the results of your shooting, you will thank yourself for buying this book.

This book is one of the better collections of how-to's and practical applications I've read on Agile user stories. It mixes in just enough of the theory to understand the importance and distinctions of epics, stories, tasks, and spikes without overly focusing on them. Then, it uses real-world examples in common language to walk you through some of the messier implementations of Agile, and provides specific guidance on how to make things work in less than ideal situations. I found this book particularly helpful for me personally, as well as for one of our less experienced Scrum Master's at work.

I have seen other presentations and publications from this author and he really seems to know his stuff, plus it's really easy to read. I'm a consultant and trainer and find this to be an excellent reference. There are lots of examples and the book is very easy to read. You also don't have to be involved in Agile development to find this useful, as I also use the concepts for developing user roles and focusing on user goals as a primary function even in a Waterfall development world.

I'm pretty much allergic to any form of requirements documentation. Change control makes my skin itch, and big up front planning makes me vomit. But I also am not totally comfortable with winging it all the time. As a project manager, I need to get a sense of how big the project is, what are the pieces and parts, and how will the product be used. And I need it fast, flexible, and without much overhead. Oh yeah, don't forget I have to also be able to use it to plan iterations, drive development and testing, and report status. All without making comprehensive documentation more important than working software or processes and tools more important than individuals and interactions.

That's why I'm glad I discovered User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development by Mike Cohn. It is a short, practical explanation of how to plan, estimate, and execute an agile project with user stories. These lightweight requirements never get in the way or replace conversations with users and customers. Instead, they help you keep track of what you're going to build and serve as a reminder to talk to SME's about what they mean. You can use them to report status, to plan iterations, and to get an overview of the product's feature set.

I wholeheartedly endorse this book for all project or product managers.

Mike does a great job explaining user stories and agile principles. Very readable and even enjoyable. This book concerns itself mainly with the 'ideal' situation: brand new product development, and does not focus on other nuances such as improvements to existing products, customer-reported defects, validated environments. That's not a criticism, as this book isn't supposed to be the unabridged encyclopedia of user stories, but I plan to read some of Mike's other books... where, hopefully, he will cover such topics

As you'll read in other reviews this book does a great job of laying the foundation on how to implement XP as a development process using user stories, iterations, and other concepts used in XP.

Where the book goes a little overboard is with some drawn out stories and examples that could be cut down. In reality I think this book could almost have 1/3 less long and been a 5 star book.