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Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (Second Edition)
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House Rules: A Joe DeMarco Thriller
Mike Lawson’s Joe DeMarco thrillers have drawn praise for their fine-tuned suspense, off-kilter characters, intricate plots, and revealing portrait of Washington, DC behind closed doors. In House Rules, a terrorist bombing of the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel is narrowly avoided. Then a private plane headed straight for the White House ignores warnings and is shot down. An atmosphere of fear and panic overruns the country, and when the junior senator from Virginia proposes to deport all noncitizen Muslims and run extensive background checks on all Muslim Americans, his bill gains surprising traction. Speaker of the House John Mahoney is not pleased. He knows it is the kind of knee-jerk response people will come to regret, like Japanese internment camps, and he needs to find a way to kill the bill before it exposes a secret he wants to keep. So Mahoney calls his man DeMarco. An average guy who struggles with debt, divorce, and an unreasonable boss, DeMarco is an unlikely hero, in over his head, relying on old friends as he attempts to get to the bottom of the attacks in this riveting read, full of suspense, fascinating characters, humor, and timely political intrigue. .
Price: $5.69
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Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency
If your company’s goal is to become fast, responsive, and agile, more efficiency is not the answer--you need more slack. Why is it that today’s superefficient organizations are ailing? Tom DeMarco, a leading management consultant to both Fortune 500 and up-and-coming companies, reveals a counterintuitive principle that explains why efficiency efforts can slow a company down. That principle is the value of slack, the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. Implementing slack could be as simple as adding an assistant to a department and letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photocopier and more time making key decisions, or it could mean designing workloads that allow people room to think, innovate, and reinvent themselves. It means embracing risk, eliminating fear, and knowing when to go slow. Slack allows for change, fosters creativity, promotes quality, and, above all, produces growth. With an approach that works for new- and old-economy companies alike, this revolutionary handbook debunks commonly held assumptions about real-world management, and gives you and your company a brand-new model for achieving and maintaining true effectiveness..
Price: $8.29
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Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior
Adrenaline junkies, dead fish, project sluts, true believers, Lewis and Clark, template zombies . . . Most developers, testers, and managers on IT projects are pretty good at recognizing patterns of behavior and gut-level hunches, as in, I sense that this project is headed for disaster. But it has always been more difficult to transform these patterns and hunches into a usable form, something a team can debate, refine, and use. Until now. In Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies, the six principal consultants of The Atlantic Systems Guild present the patterns of behavior they most often observe at the dozens of IT firms they transform each year, around the world. The result is a quick-read guide to identifying nearly ninety typical scenarios, drawing on a combined one-hundred-and-fifty years of project management experience. Project by project, you'll improve the accuracy of your hunches and your ability to act on them. The patterns are presented in an easy-reference format, with names designed to ease communication with your teammates. In just a few words, you can describe what's happening on your project. Citing the patterns of behavior can help you quickly move those above and below you to the next step on your project. You'll find classic patterns such as these: * News Improvement * Management By Mood Ring * Piling On * Rattle Yer Dags * Natural Authority * Food++ * Fridge Door * and more than eighty more! Not every pattern will be evident in your organization, and not every pattern is necessarily good or bad. However, you'll find many patterns that will apply to your current and future assignments, even in the most ambiguous circumstances. When you assess your situation and follow your next hunch, you'll have the collective wisdom of six world-class consultants at your side..
Price: $32.33
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Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects
Any software project that's worth starting will be vulnerable to risk. Since greater risks bring greater rewards, a company that runs away from risk will soon find itself lagging behind its more adventurous competition. By ignoring the threat of negative outcomes—in the name of positive thinking or a Can-Do attitude—software managers drive their organizations into the ground. In Waltzing with Bears, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister—the best-selling authors of Peopleware—show readers how to identify and embrace worthwhile risks. Developers are then set free to push the limits. You'll find that risk management * makes aggressive risk-taking possible
* protects management from getting blindsided
* provides minimum-cost downside protection
* reveals invisible transfers of responsibility
* isolates the failure of a subproject. Readers are taught to identify the most common risks faced by software projects: * schedule flaws
* requirements inflation
* turnover
* specification breakdown
* and under-performance. Packed with provocative insights, real-world examples, and project-saving tips, Waltzing with Bears is your guide to mitigating the risks—before they turn into problems..
Price: $21.38
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Tales from the Colorado Rockies (Tales)
This book looks at the humble beginnings of the Colorado Rockies as an expansion team in 1993, their historic attendance feats and fast rise to a playoff spot in 1995, and the slugging exploits of the Blake Street Bombers. The entire 15-year history of MLB first franchise in the Rocky Mountain time zone is detailed, complete with a colorful series of stories and tales about the players, managers, coaches, and front office personnel who shaped it..
Price: $11.43
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The Heart of Virtue: Lessons from Life and Literature Illustrating the Beauty and Value of Moral Character
This book presents 28 different virtues and reveals, through stories that personify these virtues, how love is expressed through care, courage, compassion, faith, hope, justice, prudence, temperance, wisdom, and others..
Price: $9.59
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