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Books over the weekend
I took the weekend off from coding and thought I would get caught up on some business-related reading.
This is a really good idea because I'm currently about 40 books behind. My stack is getting as tall as I am. When your to-read stack is as tall as you are, it's time to buck up and read. : )
Plus it's a good break from 4 weeks of heavy coding after work.
So here are the three books I tackled over the weekend and what I thought of them. (And no, I don't get any sort of payment for reviewing or linking to the books.)
Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft® Office PowerPoint® 2007 to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate, and Inspire. Good book! Made me completely re-think the way I do PowerPoint Presentations. I wish I would have read something like this many years ago. Highly recommended -- even for those who don't use PowerPoint.
Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery. This book is in the same vein, but takes the discussion up a notch into how to think and feel when preparing a presentation. It's a little fanboy about Steve Jobs, which I could have done without, but overall it gives an excellent account of how to make memorable, great presentations.
The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. I got this book because I thought it fit into the idea of making presentations as well, but it's a completely different animal. Dan Roam, the author, makes the case that back-of-napkin drawings in a collaborative setting are orders of magnitude more useful than formal diagrams. He even goes about showing how you can take problems visually and break and re-form them into solutions. What a great idea! I would add some informal back-of-napkin UML to Dan's toolkit, but other than that, count me onboard. I am quickly becoming a proponent of "structured doodling" or "whiteboarding problem skills" -- the idea that all technology team members need the ability to draw informally as a way of communicating, collaborating, and problem-solving. I'm putting Dan's book in my toolbox for the time when I can set up a more formal training regimen around these ideas.
So it was a good weekend. I learned a lot about graphics and presentations -- can't wait to do the next one! Perhaps my presentations won't be so much "death by PowerPoint" and more "Wow!"
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