Books about Development from Amazon.com

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With first-chapter allusions to martial arts, "flow," "mind like water," and other concepts borrowed from the East (and usually mangled), you'd almost think this self-helper from David Allen should have been called Zen and the Art of Schedule Maintenance.

Not quite. Yes, Getting Things Done offers a complete system for downloading all those free-floating gotta-do's clogging your brain into a sophisticated framework of files and action lists--all purportedly to free your mind to focus on whatever you're working on. However, it still operates from the decidedly Western notion that if we could just get really, really organized, we could turn ourselves into 24/7 productivity machines. (To wit, Allen, whom the New Economy bible Fast Company has dubbed "the personal productivity guru," suggests that instead of meditating on crouching tigers and hidden dragons while you wait for a plane, you should unsheathe that high-tech saber known as the cell phone and attack that list of calls you need to return.)

As whole-life-organizing systems go, Allen's is pretty good, even fun and therapeutic. It starts with the exhortation to take every unaccounted-for scrap of paper in your workstation that you can't junk, The next step is to write down every unaccounted-for gotta-do cramming your head onto its own scrap of paper. Finally, throw the whole stew into a giant "in-basket"

That's where the processing and prioritizing begin; in Allen's system, it get a little convoluted at times, rife as it is with fancy terms, subterms, and sub-subterms for even the simplest concepts. Thank goodness the spine of his system is captured on a straightforward, one-page flowchart that you can pin over your desk and repeatedly consult without having to refer back to the book. That alone is worth the purchase price. Also of value is Allen's ingenious Two-Minute Rule: if there's anything you absolutely must do that you can do right now in two minutes or less, then do it now, thus freeing up your time and mind tenfold over the long term. It's commonsense advice so obvious that most of us completely overlook it, much to our detriment; Allen excels at dispensing such wisdom in this useful, if somewhat belabored, self-improver aimed at everyone from CEOs to soccer moms (who we all know are more organized than most CEOs to start with). --Timothy Murphy.
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The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change was a groundbreaker when it was first published in 1990, and it continues to be a business bestseller with more than 10 million copies sold. Stephen Covey, an internationally respected leadership authority, realizes that true success encompasses a balance of personal and professional effectiveness, so this book is a manual for performing better in both arenas. His anecdotes are as frequently from family situations as from business challenges.

Before you can adopt the seven habits, you'll need to accomplish what Covey calls a "paradigm shift"--a change in perception and interpretation of how the world works. Covey takes you through this change, which affects how you perceive and act regarding productivity, time management, positive thinking, developing your "proactive muscles" (acting with initiative rather than reacting), and much more.

This isn't a quick-tips-start-tomorrow kind of book. The concepts are sometimes intricate, and you'll want to study this book, not skim it. When you finish, you'll probably have Post-it notes or hand-written annotations in every chapter, and you'll feel like you've taken a powerful seminar by Covey. --Joan Price.
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Building on the revolutionary ASP.NET 2.0 release, ASP.NET 3.5 adds several key new developer features including AJAX, LINQ, and a new CSS designer in Visual Web Developer 2008. The dramatic reduction in code that developers realized from the more than 50 new server controls in ASP.NET 2.0 now allows developers the time to make their applications more interactive with AJAX, to work with data in their preferred language with LINQ, and to build visually attractive and consistent standards-based sites with CSS.

Professional ASP.NET 3.5 helps the experienced programmer put these new technologies into action. Greatly expanded from the original best-selling Professional ASP.NET 2.0, Professional ASP.NET 3.5 covers all the key technologies retained from 2.0 in new depth alongside the hundreds of pages of coverage of the important new 3.5 features. Written by 3 of the most well-known and influential ASP.NET developers who were highly praised by ASP.NET creator Scott Guthrie for their ASP.NET 2.0 books, Professional ASP.NET 3.5 is the book you’ll learn the language from and turn to day after day as you write web applications. And as always, Professional ASP.NET 3.5 features language examples in the book and in the code download in both C# and VB!

Key new coverage for ASP.NET 3.5 includes:

• Thorough coverage of how to implement ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX and the ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit
• An introduction to LINQ and many LINQ examples throughout the book side-by-side with the related SQL example to show you the differences between the two
• Enhanced coverage of XML use in ASP.NET including the new XML Schema Designer Add-on, LINQ to XML, LINQ for XML examples, and XSLTC.exe, a command-line XSLT compiler
• A new chapter on CSS design for ASP.NET and the Visual Web Developer CSS design tools
• A new chapter on the ASP.NET lifecycle and architecture best-practices
• Increased coverage of ASP.NET with SQL Server 2005 and Oracle as the databases
• Coverage of enhancing your ASP.NET applications with Microsoft’s new Silverlight for stunning video and animation uses
• Coverage of Scott Hanselman’s famous productivity tool picks for developers to help make you a more productive ASP.NET developer
• Updated coverage of migrating applications for previous ASP.NET versions

Key coverage retained and improved from the ASP.NET 2.0 book:

• The idea of the server control and its pivotal role in ASP.NET development
• How to create templated ASP.NET pages using the master page feature
• Techniques for debugging and handling errors
• Ways to package and deploy ASP.NET applications
• How to retrieve, update, and delete data quickly and logically
• How to implement the cultures and regions features to localize your web site into multiple languages for different visitors
• An understanding of how to use and extend the provider model for accessing data stores, processes, and more
• How to keep track of your application's performance and health with monitoring tools

Who this book is for

This book is for experienced programmers and developers who are looking to make the transition to ASP.NET 3.5..
Price: $30.60 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Jeannette Walls's father always called her "Mountain Goat" and there's perhaps no more apt nickname for a girl who navigated a sheer and towering cliff of childhood both daily and stoically In The Glass Castle, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents--Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father. To call the elder Walls's childrearing style laissez faire would be putting it mildly. As Rose Mary and Rex, motivated by whims and paranoia, uprooted their kids time and again, the youngsters (Walls, her brother and two sisters) were left largely to their own devices. But while Rex and Rose Mary firmly believed children learned best from their own mistakes, they themselves never seemed to do so, repeating the same disastrous patterns that eventually landed them on the streets. Walls describes in fascinating detail what it was to be a child in this family, from the embarrassing (wearing shoes held together with safety pins; using markers to color her skin in an effort to camouflage holes in her pants) to the horrific (being told, after a creepy uncle pleasured himself in close proximity, that sexual assault is a crime of perception; and being pimped by her father at a bar). Though Walls has well earned the right to complain, at no point does she play the victim. In fact, Walls' removed, nonjudgmental stance is initially startling, since many of the circumstances she describes could be categorized as abusive (and unquestioningly neglectful). But on the contrary, Walls respects her parents' knack for making hardships feel like adventures, and her love for them--despite their overwhelming self-absorption--resonates from cover to cover. --Brangien Davis.
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Anyone who has dealt with a strong-willed child knows that it is no easy task to turn bad behavior around. But the popularity of TV programs like Supernanny and Nanny 911 shows that parents have had it up to here and are ready to try anything to get their children to behave. Bestselling author and psychologist Dr. Kevin Leman is here to help. Have a New Kid by Friday shows parents how to reverse negative behavior in their children--fast! With his signature wit and encouragement, Dr. Leman offers hope and real, practical, doable strategies for regaining control and becoming the parents they always wanted to be. Focusing on changing a child's attitude, behavior, and character, it contains chapters for each day of the week and a special section with advice on everything from rolling eyes to sibling rivalry to talking back to punching walls and much, much more. This large section of more than 100 specific topics is indexed, allowing parents to flip immediately to any areas of concern for witty, straightforward, and gutsy plans of action. EXCERPT FROM CATALOG I've got news for you. Since the beginning of time, kids have been unionized, and they've got a game plan to drive you bonkers. Don't believe it? Take a look around….In today's society, kids even shorter than a yardstick are calling the shots. Some hedonistic little suckers of the ankle-biter battalion have even graduated to emeritus status and are holding down the hormone group division. Then there's the already-adult children who return home to your cozy little nest and stay and stay and stay…. You know all about that. If you picked up this book, you picked it up for a reason. You'd like to see a few things--or maybe many--change in your house. You may have small concerns, or big concerns, about your child at this point.… I'll be blunt. You got a big job to do as a parent, and a short window to do it in. If you believe that you, as a parent, are to be in healthy authority over your child, this book is for you. If you don't believe that you, as a parent, are to be in healthy authority over your child, put this book down right now and buy another.… But I've got a Midas muffler guarantee for you. If you stick to the simple strategies in this book--strategies that any parent can carry out--you'll have a new kid by Friday. You can have a great kid, and you can be a great parent. Your relationship with your child can change in just one week..
Price: $12.23 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Effectively managing personnel--as well as one's own behavior--is an extraordinarily complex task that, not surprisingly, has been the subject of countless books touting what each claims is the true path to success That said, Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton's Now, Discover Your Strengths does indeed propose a unique approach: focusing on enhancing people's strengths rather than eliminating their weaknesses. Following up on the coauthors' popular previous book, First, Break All the Rules, it fully describes 34 positive personality themes the two have formulated (such as Achiever, Developer, Learner, and Maximizer) and explains how to build a "strengths-based organization" by capitalizing on the fact that such traits are already present among those within it.

Most original and potentially most revealing, however, is a Web-based interactive component that allows readers to complete a questionnaire developed by the Gallup Organization and instantly discover their own top-five inborn talents. This device provides a personalized window into the authors' management philosophy which, coupled with subsequent advice, places their suggestions into the kind of practical context that's missing from most similar tomes. "You can't lead a strengths revolution if you don't know how to find, name and develop your own," write Buckingham and Clifton. Their book encourages such introspection while providing knowledgeable guidance for applying its lessons. --Howard Rothman.
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