Brian Clifton
Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics

This is a practical how-to guide to Google Analytics, the most widely used web statistics service. The author did an excellent job covering web analytics basic features and reports as well as explaining more advanced topics:

1. Backing up data locally
2. Tracking non-HTML events
3. Tracking marketing campaigns
4. Goals and funnels
5. Segregating data using profile filters and advanced segments
6. Extending analytics using custom variables
7. GA integration API

James Steele and Nelson To
The Android Developer's Cookbook

Smart-phone market and mobile web consumption are exploding. Within the next few years, more users will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktops. We are in the middle of the next technological revolution.

Android has recently overtaken iPhone in US market share and continues to enjoy widespread adoption among device manufacturers. James Steele's and Nelson To's cookbook helps get started building mobile applications for Android. Organized as a set of independent easy-to-follow recipes, it provides an excellent overview of the fast-growing Android development platform:

1. Threads, Services, Receivers
2. Activities, Intents
3. User Interface elements
4. Touches and Gestures
5. Audio and Video support
6. Communicating with other devices
7. Location services
8. Sensors

John Kotter
Leading Change

Leading Change is a practical guide to implementing change in a corporate business environment. It is essentially a change process consisting of 8 main stages:

1. Establish a sense of urgency and overcome complacency.
2. Create a strong guiding coalition.
3. Develop an inspiring vision and strategy for achieving it to help employees take actions in the right directions.
4. Communicate the vision in a simple and clear message.
5. Empower employees to experiment with how to make the vision a reality.
6. Generate and celebrate short wins.
7. Consolidate gains and produce more change.
8. Anchor new approaches in the culture.

David Anderson
Kanban. Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business.

Kanban is the latest book by David Anderson, the author of Agile Management for Software Engineering: Applying the Theory of Constraints for Business Results. While searching for sustainable software development and successful change management, David expanded the ideas of Theory of Constraints and Lean Manufacturing. The new methods got their first real-world implementation at Corbis and Microsoft and the results are presented in this book.

Kanban systems have been gaining popularity in software development and information technology. They represent a pull-system approach, which produces what the next process needs when it needs it. Thus, the new work is pulled into the system when there is a capacity to handle it.

Kanban systems often visualize the development workflow and all work in progress (WIP) on a card wall, where each card represents a single work item. If your objectives are to improve lead time predictability and increase throughput, you can achieve them by limiting WIP, identifying and alleviating bottlenecks, and reducing variability.

Michael Feathers
Working Effectively with Legacy Code

To buy this book from Amazon, click here.

Legacy code is defined by Michael Feathers as code that lacks tests. Lack of tests makes the code hard to understand and difficult to change. When the code is changed, new subtle bugs are often inadvertently introduced. When the code breaks, countless hours are spent troubleshooting.

Does it sound familiar? If you are writing software professionally, the chances are you have worked with legacy code many times before. You may be working with legacy code now. If this is the case, you will find Michael Feathers' book invaluable.

Neil Davidson
Don't Just Roll the Dice: A usefully short guide to software pricing

To buy this book from Amazon, click here.

To download a free eBook, click here.

For the month of December, I picked a short fun-to-read book filled with refreshing yet practical ideas on software pricing. The book is very informative, thought-provoking, and engaging. Will it become something you enjoy reading over the upcoming holidays?

Neil Davidson, the author of the Don't Just Roll the Dice, is a co-founder of the Red Gate Software that provides database tools for developers and administrators. Neil investigates how to make an informed guess at what your product is worth on the market. In the attempt to answer this question, he describes many first-hand real-world experiences demonstrating how a pricing strategy can work to your advantage over your competition.

Mike Rother, John Shook
Learning to See: Value-Stream Mapping to Create Value and Eliminate MUDA

A value stream is all the actions required to bring a product or a service to a consumer. Value-stream mapping is a tool used to visualize and analyze the flow of materials and information in a value stream. Value-stream mapping identifies the sources of waste in a value stream and helps you improve the whole system, not just its individual components.

In Learning to See, Mike Rother and John Shook highlight the differences between "Push", which produces according to a schedule, and "Pull", which produces only what the next process needs when it needs it. They explain why "Push" results in overproduction and other types of waste and offer their guidelines on how to introduce a lean value stream that generates the shortest lead time, highest quality, and lowest cost:

Steve Resnick, Richard Crane, Chris Bowen
Essential Windows Communication Foundation. For .NET Framework 3.5.

This is a well-organized and easy-to-read introductory book on WCF. It provides a thorough overview of the principles behind building and consuming WCF web services and includes real-world examples illustrating how to leverage WCF framework in your applications. The topics covered in this book include:

• Contracts: how to define complex structures and interfaces
• Channels: how to configure channels and channel stacks
• Bindings: how to choose communication protocols
• Behaviors: how to manage instances, concurrency, and transactions as well as how to add your own custom behaviors
• Serialization and Encoding: how .NET classes are serialized and represented on the wire
• Hosting services in IIS, WAS, and managed .NET applications
• Security options for authentication and transport- and message-level security for Internet and Intranet applications
• Integration with other frameworks such as WF and Silverlight
• Other topics: JSON, RSS/ATOM, peer networking, metadata publishing, diagnostics, and others

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Mihaly defines flow as a state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously ordered and thoughts and actions are congruent with each other. People experiencing flow are fully involved in the activity and continue doing it for its own sake. The experience is genuinely satisfying. Nothing else seems to matter.

The author provides general principles and examples that illustrate how such experiences happen. He points out that the normal state of mind is chaos. Without training and without an external object that demands attention, it is hard to concentrate long enough to achieve "optimal experience". This presents a significant challenge for building an environment conducive to flow.