There’s a great book referred to me by a friend called ‘Getting Real’ by that great web development firm 37 Signals, masters of Rails, and creators of some fantastic web 2.0 applications.
A fairly short read, it is nontheless packed with incredible wisdom on how web applications need to be developed. Out goes the conventional system of huge scope documents and endless meetings to decide on the feature set - in’Getting Real’ they very clearly lay out a system that allows you, the developer, to get a application built and live in the shortest possible time.

The current system of developing web applications has come from the offline software development field where a new, updated version any software is released every 2 years or so. The advantage with web applications is that new features can be added/removed/tweaked at any point even when running live.  This makes web applications very flexible and further agility can be achieved by not getting caught up in minor details that push the launch of an app back by months and sometimes years. The philosophy is launch now and tweak later.

You can read the book for free on the 37 Signals web site or buy either the pdf or physical book. Check it all out at http://getreal.37signals.com/ 

Back when I was about 9 or 10 years old I read a book called ‘Fear is the key’ by Alistair Maclean. Although just a novel, the concept of how fear can be used as an effective weapon was well impressed upon me.

No better example than what happened at the UK airports over the last week or so. Kudos to the security services for foiling the plot but I think the psychological Read the rest of this entry »

Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki.

The tag-line on the cover of this book is “What the rich teach their kids - that you can learn too”

In this book, Robert Kiyosaki explains that he was raised, in terms of real-world education, by two fathers - his real father who was highly qualified but poor and his friend’s father who had never gotten past Read the rest of this entry »

By Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln

Unless you’ve been living under a rock the past 3 years you’ll have read, or at least heard of, “The Da Vinci Code” by author Dan Brown and possibly watched the movie starring Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou released a few months ago.

“The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” is basically the foundation Dan Brown used for “The Da Vinci Code” and digs deeper into a particular Grail theory, that of Read the rest of this entry »

by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson

Rails looks to be the next big thing for web developers looking for an easy-to-use framework to quickly go live with their projects. Read the rest of this entry »

‘The Clash of Civilizations And the Remaking of World Order’ by Samuel P. Huntington

“One of the most important books to have emerged since the end of the cold war” Henry Kissinger

Samuel P. Huntington discusses in this book how the world has changed after the end of the Cold War. Where before the distinctions among peoples were idealogical, political and economic, in the post Cold-war era the distinction is Read the rest of this entry »