Oscar Del Ben

The art of war book review

I just finished reading The art of war today. This is a book about military strategy written in the ancient China by Sun Tzu. Unless you are a general military you may wonder why one would read a book like this, but let me explain: this book has influenced a wide mainstream of people, ranging from business people to philosophers and of course military of all times.

The biggest lesson from this book in my opinion is that a winner is the one who wins a fight without fighting, avoiding contact and death, and this is definitely something applicable to our everyday lives.

You can read the book online if you want but I suggest you to buy a printed version if you want to know more about it and find explanations by other authors. Unfortunately I read an italian version of the book, so I can't suggest you a good one in english.

Unlimited Power book review

This book is about producing results in life, and is written by the self help guru Tony Robbins. The author clearly explain that his purpose is to make you achieve your life goals by the using a combination of pnl techniques to change your internal and external behaviors until you get what you want.

The book is written using a clear an concise style with practical actions and exercises you can take to immediately apply and benefit from the lessons learned in the book. It's not necessary to remember how doing exercises can accelerate your learning process.

The author is not always predicating what I already knew as common sense, in fact I had more than a few 'aha' moments. If you follow the instructions and advices from this book, you'll be on a highroad to success, because you'll be able to understand more about yourself and your power. It has been a few months since I read this book for the first time, and I'm looking forward to read it again.

Author: Anthony Robbins

Publisher: Free Press (December 22, 1997)

Pages: 448

ISBN: 978-0684845777

The Rubyist issue number 1

I bought this magazine the same day as it went out last summer but today I've spent some time reading it again. This is the kind of reading that feeds my curiosity about the not so known ruby community. In the first issue there are articles about merb performance, auditing your code, interact with mac os x and much more. Looking at the official website, a new issue should be published very soon, but you can still purchase the first copy if you want.

UPDATE

It looks that today there's a new rails magazine available. I'm looking forward for the pdf edition.

The art of learning book review

Introduction

The art of learning is a book written by Josh Waitzkin, a respected individual who is famous for being a great chess champion since he was very young and also for being a world champion of tai chi many years later. In his book, the art of learning, Josh is sharing and explaining his own expertise and advice that made his success.

The book is divided into three major parts, the first and the second are a journey through the two principal activities of Josh, chess and martial arts, while the third part is a combination of the expertise and similitude of the firsts two.

The following list is a series of central points which are for me the essence of Josh's book.

Principles:

Principles are the essence of learning. When Josh was learning chess, he played a lot of games using only one or two pieces at time, so that he could learn almost everything about every single piece. In the same manner, every subject or discipline have its own principles. Of course it might be hard to find them, but the payoff of finding and practice those principles is a huge benefit. 

Psychology pressure:

Josh noted that the amount of concentration that he needed on every single chess match was very high to achieve, and so easy to break. By learning to live and control emotions, he was able to ensure his endurance and performance in every aspect of his life.

Intuition:

Intuition come from expertise, and expertise come from practice, so combining all the principles together with practice, anyone is able to become a master in his field. 

Practice:

Josh book is focused on the importance of practice in order to become a master. The secret is to practice in the right way and with the right attitude.

Watch Yourself:

If we could watch ourselves performing our art and then correcting one bad habit a time, we would eventually become perfect, this is why serious group works are so effective.

Resources

• Josh Waitzkin entry on wikipedia
• Josh Waitzking website
• The art of learning on amazon.com

  
 

The purple cow book review

For nearly thirty years, companies used to pay millions of dollars on television advertising, and it worked well. If you could pay the bill, then a lot of people would see your ad and eventually buy your products. Now this model is no longer working, people have started to look for other products and the belief of as seen on tv that made the fortune of many large companies is gone, probably forever. The result from the prospective of the consumer are better products, more concurrency and low prices.

But suppose you are the company, and you have not the money for traditional advertising, which is not that bad because we have already seen that is not longer working, how are you supposed to promote you new product? Unless you lived in the moon for the last 10 years, you probably heard about two guys that put together google from nothing, and what about other examples like starbucks and apple? Yes, the probably had more money, but their products stands out because they were remarkable, yes, this is what companies now need to do, create remarkable products, which is the subject of the book purple cow written by Seth Godin.

Now, this mostly an introduction to the firsts chapters, but in the rest of the book you'll see a lot of real examples and tips to create your own purple cow, and how this business model works by the power of passing the word between people . People now wants value from what you sell, and it's only up to your responsibility to give them what they want.

The greatest salesman in the world book review

I came across this book while searching for business and related books on amazon a few months ago. I didn't know much about it but I was impressed by the quantity and quality of the reviews, so I decided to grab a copy for myself.

It turned out that this is a fantastic book, which tells a story about a lucky guy who received a chest containing 10 papers with principles to become the best salesman and person in the world. These principles are revealed through the corse of the book, but I want to share and discuss some of them here.

Develop good habits

As described by many other successfully people, it's important to develop good habits in order to succeed, this mean that you should take good principles by applying them and get off by bad ones. This can be achieved only by exercise and motivation.

Determination

Determination is the key to maintain a good habit once you have started by permitting to follow a schedule during what I call the learning phase, where you mind is exposed to the new habit and need to get used by it to be changed.

Love everything

You should start to love everything from the people around to the nature and everything else. This is hard to change, but I can start by first recognize when I react in a bad way and then fix it the next time.

Persistence

Aside from determination, persistence ensure the duration of a good habit, even after the learning phase.

Master emotions

Emotions are responsible for our personality, so it's important to learn to control and live with them. This is hard work, but if practiced enough, strong results are guaranteed. Many athletes are practicing this for years in order to became the best in their field.

Laugh

Laughing like a child is a good exercise both for the body and the spirit. Obviously it is probably a bad idea to laugh in the face of your boss, but you got the point.

Multiple your value each day

This is something that I totally agree with. Each day you should plan your goals even further. This is done in combination with the other principles. I've started to setting goals for every day so I can start in the morning with my difficult tasks and then enjoy the rest of the life

I will act now

There's not much to say about procrastination. Stop. Do it now!

Pray for guidance

I'm not a religious or spiritual person, but the point here is to believe in your long term success and pray for it.

Conclusion

A combination of these principles will lead to an highly effective individual. As I told you earlier, the only thing to do is practice, practice and practice again.

Rspec book announced

So, after more than a year of voices about it, it looks that the pragmatic programmers finally announced a book about rspec. The title will be available on april of the next year and I don't know if there will be a beta version.

The mind map book review

I became more interested about mind maps after reading pragmatic thinking and learning, so i went to amazon to find a good book about mind mapping. I had enough luck to find The Mind Map Book: How to Use Radiant Thinking to Maximize Your Brain's Untapped Potential, which is written directly by Tony Buzan, the creator of modern mind maps techniques.

The book is divided in three major parts, the first part explain why the use of mind maps is efficient and how it reflect the structure of our mind in the act of learning and thinking. The second part introduces the effective way of producing a mind map, explaining the difference between various techniques and methods. The last part of the book explores different environments like family, work and learning where the use of mind mapping could dramatically improve the experience.

Conclusion: be sure to read this book as soon as possible if you haven't already, even if you think that you are not interested in map mapping.

High performance web sites book review

This is a book about fast web sites.

Steve Souders, the author, was involved in the performance revision for yahoo, and collected his experience in the book high performance web sites.

The first important lesson, is that the 80-90 percent of loading time, is not time about html rendering (back-end), but instead is devoted at browser things, such as loading images, scripts and other factors that you will learn in the course of the book, which in fact is written with the purpose of reducing that amount of time.

High performance web sites  is written in a concise way, meaning that you'll find exactly the informations you need, collected in 14 easy to follow rules, most of them directly applicable for every web site.

A personal note: even if the book is oriented at front end developers, i found the chapters about conditional tags and http headers to be very interesting for the rest of us, since rails 2.2 will introduce custom helpers for take advantage of them.

The millionaire next door book review

The millionaire next door is a book written by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko that is the result of many years of research about the lifestyle of the millionaires people in United States.

If you think that common millionaire individuals spend their time with shopping, buy new cars and travels, you might be wrong. Researches (included in the book) shows that the major average of millionaires don't usually buy a current-year car model, they don't spend their money in shopping or travels and much more.

Unfortunately television is bombarding our minds with images of cool people with a lot of money that enjoy life, but I now know they are not following typical lifestyle of a self-made rich person.

Of course you will learn how they becomes rich by saving money, investing instead of paying more taxes. I recommend this book to anyone that is looking for proven cases about how people accumulate fortunes or simply on how to became more wealth.