Books about Cockburn from Amazon.com

(Pearson Education) An up-to-date guide to writing use cases, expanding on the classic treatments into intermediate and advanced concepts, making this guide appropriate for all skill levels. Softcover. DLC: Application software--Development. .
Price: $32.54 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Time magazine listed him as one of its "100 People Who Shape Our World." Newsweek featured him on its cover under the headline "How Al-Sadr May Control U.S. Fate in Iraq." Paul Bremer denounced him as a "Bolshevik Islamist" and ordered that he be captured "dead or alive." Who is Muqtada al-Sadr, and why is he so vital to the future of Iraq and, arguably, the entire Middle East?

In this compellingly readable account, prize-winning journalist Patrick Cockburn tells the story of Muqtada's rise to become the leader of Iraq's poor Shi'ites and the resistance to the occupation. Cockburn looks at the killings by Saddam's executioners and hit men of the young cleric's father, two brothers, and father-in-law; his leadership of the seventy-thousand-strong Mehdi Army; the fierce rivalries between him and other Shia religious leaders; his complex relationship with the Iraqi government; and his frequent confrontations with the American military, including battles that took place in Najaf in 2004. The portrait that emerges is of a complex man and a sophisticated politician, who engages with religious and nationalist aspirations in a manner unlike any other Iraqi leader.

Cockburn, who was among the very few Western journalists to remain in Baghdad during the Gulf War and has been an intrepid reporter of Iraq ever since, draws on his extensive firsthand experience in the country to produce a book that is richly interwoven with the voices of Iraqis themselves. His personal encounters with the Mehdi Army include a tense occasion when he was nearly killed at a roadblock outside the city of Kufa.

Though it often reads like an adventure story, Muqtada is also a work of painstaking research and measured analysis that leads to a deeper understanding both of one of the most critical conflicts in the world today and of the man who may well be a decisive voice in determining the future of Iraq when the Americans eventually leave..
Price: $11.24 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Carefully researched over ten years and eagerly anticipated by the agile community, Crystal Clear: A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams is a lucid and practical introduction to running a successful agile project in your organization. Each chapter illuminates a different important aspect of orchestrating agile projects.

Highlights include

Attention to the essential human and communication aspects of successful projects
Case studies, examples, principles, strategies, techniques, and guiding properties
Samples of work products from real-world projects instead of blank templates and toy problems
Top strategies used by software teams that excel in delivering quality code in a timely fashion
Detailed introduction to emerging best-practice techniques, such as Blitz Planning, Project 360º, and the essential Reflection Workshop
Question-and-answer with the author about how he arrived at these recommendations, including where they fit with CMMI, ISO, RUP, XP, and other methodologies
A detailed case study, including an ISO auditor's analysis of the project

Perhaps the most important contribution this book offers is the Seven Properties of Successful Projects. The author has studied successful agile projects and identified common traits they share. These properties lead your project to success; conversely, their absence endangers your project..
Price: $22.54 [Notify me when price goes down.]

“Agile Software Development is a highly stimulating and rich book. The author has a deep background and gives us a tour de force of the emerging agile methods ”

–Tom Gilb

 

The agile model of software development has taken the world by storm. Now, in Agile Software Development, Second Edition, one of agile’s leading pioneers updates his Jolt Productivity award-winning book to reflect all that’s been learned about agile development since its original introduction.

 

Alistair Cockburn begins by updating his powerful model of software development as a “cooperative game of invention and communication.” Among the new ideas he introduces: harnessing competition without damaging collaboration; learning lessons from lean manufacturing; and balancing strategies for communication. Cockburn also explains how the cooperative game is played in business and on engineering projects, not just software development

 

Next, he systematically illuminates the agile model, shows how it has evolved, and answers the questions developers and project managers ask most often, including

 

·      Where does agile development fit in our organization?

·      How do we blend agile ideas with other ideas?

·      How do we extend agile ideas more broadly?

 

Cockburn takes on crucial misconceptions that cause agile projects to fail. For example, you’ll learn why encoding project management strategies into fixed processes can lead to ineffective strategy decisions and costly mistakes. You’ll also find a thoughtful discussion of the controversial relationship between agile methods and user experience design.

 

Cockburn turns to the practical challenges of constructing agile methodologies for your own teams. You’ll learn how to tune and continuously reinvent your methodologies, and how to manage incomplete communication. This edition contains important new contributions on these and other topics:

 

·      Agile and CMMI

·      Introducing agile from the top down

·      Revisiting “custom contracts”

·      Creating change with “stickers”

 

In addition, Cockburn updates his discussion of the Crystal methodologies, which utilize his “cooperative game” as their central metaphor.

 

If you’re new to agile development, this book will help you succeed the first time out. If you’ve used agile methods before, Cockburn’s techniques will make you even more effective.

 

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Price: $31.23 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A shocking expose of the CIA's role as drug baron. On March 18, 1998, the CIA's Inspector General, Fred Hitz, told astounded US Reps that the CIA had maintained relationships with companies and individuals that the Agency knew to be involved in the drug business. More shocking was the revelation that the CIA had received from Reagan's Justice Department clearance not to report any knowledge it might have of drug-dealing by CIA assets. Many years' worth of CIA denials, much of it under oath to Congress, were sunk. Hitz's admissions made fools of some of the most prominent names in US journalism and vindicated others that had been ruined. Particularly resonant was the case of the San Jose Mercury News, which published a sensational series on CIA involvement in the smuggling of cocaine into black urban neighborhoods, and then under pressure conspired in the destruction of its own reporter, Gary Webb. In Whiteout, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair finally put the whole story together, from the earliest days, when the CIA's institutional ancestors cut a deal with America's premier gangster and drug trafficker, Lucky Luciano. This is a thrilling history that stretches from Sicily in 1944 to the killing fields of Laos and Vietnam, to CIA safe houses in Greenwich Village and San Francisco where CIA men watched Agency-paid prostitutes feed LSD to unsuspecting clients. We meet Oliver North, as he plotted with Manuel Noriega and Central American gangsters. We travel to little-known airports in Costa Rica and Arkansas. We hear from drug pilots and accountants from the Cali Cartel. We learn of DEA agents whose careers were ruined because they tried to tell the truth. Cockburn and St. Clair show how the CIA's complicity with drug-dealing criminal gangs was part and parcel of its attacks on labor organizers, whether on the docks of New York, Marseilles, or Shanghai. They trace how the Cold War and counter-insurgency led to an alliance between the Agency and the vilest of war criminals like Klaus Barbie, or fanatic opium traders like the mujahedin in Afghanistan. Cockburn and St. Clair horrifyingly affirm charges of outraged black communities that the CIA had undertaken enduring programs of experiments on minorities. They show that the CIA imported Nazi scientists straight from their labs at Dachau and Buchenwald and set to work, developing chemical and biological agents, tested on blacks, some of them in mental hospitals. Cockburn and St. Clair dissect the shameful way American journalists have not only turned a blind eye to the Agency's misdeeds, but also helped plunge the knife into those who tried to tell the truth. Fact-packed and fast-paced, Whiteout is a richly detailed excavation of the CIA's dirtiest secrets. For anyone who wants to know the real truth about the Agency, this is the book to start with..
Price: $13.85 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Presents sound advice for bringing difficult projects to successful conclusion with a minimum of stress. Written for developers and project managers, comparing software development to a game. Softcover. .
Price: $22.31 [Notify me when price goes down.]

It's been called the most intense popular uprising since the protests against the Vietnam War. In October 1999, fifty thousand citizens occupied the streets in a successful effort to shut the World Trade Organization's ministerial meeting. Trade unionists, environmentalists, human rights advocates and farmers converged on Seattle to denounce the new global economy. Street corners were occupied by irate French farmers, Earth First!ers locked themselves to hotel doors to prevent WTO delegates from exiting, the convention center was circled by a human chain, and black-clad anarchists roamed the streets, smashing the windows of Gap, Niketown, and the Bank of America. The Seattle cops responded fiercely, saturating the air with tear gas, attacking demonstrators with riot clubs, rubber bullets, and pepper spray. The street battle raged for three days. Six hundred people were arrested, held without lawyers at a local military base. But when the smoke and gas cleared, the protesters had prevailed: the WTO talks had collapsed. Five Days that Shook the World takes you onto the streets of Seattle with on-the-spot reporting and photographs. But it also looks at the broader issues raised by the protest: the secretive and undemocratic practice of the WTO, the trampling on rights to assembly and free speech by deploying the military to put down protest, and the menace to individual liberties of globalization and offshore government..
Price: $5.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]