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| Useful Reading Material – Part 1 | ||
| Those
of you who know me know that I read quite a lot. Because so many of you
tell me you don’t have the time to read, this is an updated list
of material I have found useful, beyond the obvious resources. In the first part of this article, I will list both magazines and books, with the books referencing technical and project management issues. Magazines Magazines are my favorite sources of information, because the articles tend to be short and to-the-point, and I can tear them out to save for future reference. These days, I tend to read CRM Magazine (www.destinationcrm.com) for project information and InfoWorld (www.infoworld.com) for general IT information. Articles from these publications are available on their Web sites as well as in the free print magazines. CRM Magazine may seem an unusual reading choice for me, a person in the LIMS industry, but if you substitute “LIMS” for “CRM,” you will find the articles useful; many touch on the same issues we struggle with in the LIMS world. To give one example, a recently published article entitled, “The Future of Standalone CRM,” discusses how “companies must combine project management with CRM to extend and deepen customer relationships.” I will point out that this magazine tends to include more articles of interest to those of us who provide products and services than to those who purchase products and services. As a member of PMI (Project Management Institute, (www.pmi.org), I receive their magazines. If you are doing any project management, I highly recommend this membership, if only to receive the magazines; PMI conferences are excellent, as well. Books Over the years, I have built a collection of useful technical and business books. What follows is a list of the books I tend to recommend most often. Each book is listed, followed by a paragraph about it, with the author(s), publishing company, and date published immediately following. Technical Issues: Obviously, this section isn’t going to list books about your LIMS product. You’ll have to get that information from your software vendor, for now. I should point out, however, that I have seen a variety of third-party books on the major brands of reporting software. I’ve even seen third-party books out on HR and ERP software, but I haven’t seen any LIMS books in the major bookstores. I’ve heard that there is a book on LIMS out there somewhere, but that it’s general. As of yet, I haven’t seen one specifically dealing with a particular product—and I don’t expect to. "UNIX for the Impatient" On rare occasions, I need to use UNIX and when I do, I just want to finish whatever it is that I need to do as quickly as possible. The format of this book works better for me than most other UNIX books. One reason is its detailed Table of Contents, which I find useful. I suggest you peruse this book first, to see if this format is useful to you, as well. Abrahams, Paul W. and Larson, Bruce R., Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1992. "UNIX for VMS Programmers" This is absolutely the best UNIX book that I own. When I use this book, it’s a no-brainer for me to find the UNIX commands I need. The catch to this, of course, is that I started my professional life working on the VMS operating system. For anyone who came from the VMS world and needs to quickly find UNIX commands, this is the book. Bourne, Philip E., Digital Press, 1990. "Oracle SQL*Plus" This is a pocket-sized book on Oracle’s SQL*Plus. It easily fits into my laptop case, as it is around 7” x 4.25” (17.5 cm x 10.5 cm) and 0.25” (0.5 cm) thick. When a similar reference comes out for SQL Server, I hope someone will let me know. When I’m on the road, I use this book even when I’m working with SQLServer because the LIMS products I typically work with allow database error messages to come through. So, it’s obvious when I’ve used a command that is meant only for Oracle. This doesn’t happen to me often, as the standalone SQL most of us do in a LIMS is fairly standard. Gennick, Jonathan, O’Reilly & Associates, Inc., 2000. "SQL: The Complete Reference" This book covers SQL “history, market trends, and feature comparison of all the leading brands of SQL DBMS” (cover) and includes a CD-ROM with trial software of the major database products. As you can imagine, this is a huge reference book. Much of the SQL I write is limited, because the LIMS products I usually work with create their own SQL. So, I do not use this book often. When I do need it, however, it does come in handy. It’s not worth carrying when you travel unless you’re doing a lot of hard-core SQL programming for a variety of mainstream databases. Even then, I’m still not sure it’s worth taking something this big on the road. Groff, James R. and Paul N. Weinberg. Osborne, 1999. "Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Networking" This book would be interesting if you need to know how networks operate and would like to learn some basic terminology about them. This is not the book to read if you need in-depth technical information to help you work out your network problems. I should point out that this book has been updated since I bought my copy. I should also admit that this is the one book on this list that I haven’t completely read, as about half-way through it, I decided that knowing all this wasn’t going to be as useful or interesting to me as I’d thought. Gibbs, Mark, Sams Publishing, 1995. Project Management: "The Deadline" This book is useful for the first-time project manager. It is told as a fictional story. Depending on your point of view, it is either corny or charming, but it outlines the basic tenets of project management in a way that makes some of the concepts more easily understood to someone with little or no experience. People with some experience may also benefit from reading it, as well. DeMarco, Tom, Dorset House Publishing, 1997. Next
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