The Pragmatic Programmers sent me the above titled book for review. My first initial take was that this book would bash India and the other countries who are leading the way in (stealing American’s jobs) offshore outsourcing. This topic has become literally the hottest discussion topic in the IT field. (see our sister site).

The subtitle for this book, “52 Ways to Save Your Job” is really more appropriate for the book. I guess Mr. Fowler threw in India for shock value.

The first chapter of the book explains the author’s journey to India to create a “seed team” for offshore development. He looks to hire 25 initially with an ultimate goal of hiring 250.

After the initial chapter the balance of the book focuses on the subtitle above. It is the balance of the book that has led me to share this book with my entire team at work. It describes in detail what I have been teaching my people for years now, its not about the hands-down work, it is about marketing, learning the business and selling yourself. Or, as our CIO puts it, being employable versus being employed.

The chapters I found most interesting are:

• Supply and Demand — you can/t compete on price
• Coding don’t cut it anymore — learning the business is what keeps your job, your job
• Love it or leave it — find your passion
• Understand business basics — this allows you to create value for yourself
• Mind reader — think ahead, think way ahead
• Marketing perceptions — perception is reality
• Being present — clients want to see you — this is something the offshore worker cannot provide (yes I know there is video conferencing but its not the same)
• Lead ‘em — lead the offshore workers
• Manage /em — manage the offshore workers

My conclusion is that this book is an absolutely essential read for all levels of IT workers. The book is a short read at 185 pages and is easy to read as well. The book is priced a little higher than I would like; it should be priced in the $15 range. The only negative is that some of the chapters are too light in actionable steps. Consider this an intro and then go research the topics that you find interesting and rewarding.

Product Rating:

Company:
The Pragmatic Programmers

Requirements:
N/A

Pricing:
19.95

Reviewed by:
Allen

Competition:
N/A

Pros:
Excellent book for keeping your job.

Cons:
A little pricey, could go more indepth on some topics.

Bottom Line:
Absolutely worth a read for any IT worker.

I am basically posting this here as a reference for myself, but I’m sure the information will be helpful to other people out there, as well.

Occasionally, when working on my Web server, I need to create a new user on the server and grant one or more other users permission to view and edit files within the new user’s home directory. This task, in itself, does not seem all that difficult on the surface. However, because most Unix servers are set up (and rightfully so, for security purposes) not to allow most users to navigate outside of their own home directories, it becomes a problem.

Let’s say, for example, that you have two users on your Web server that you want to allow permissions to view and edit each other’s home directories, but you don’t want them to have access to any other files and folders on the Web server.

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Apparently, Microsoft released the public version of the first service pack for Windows Vista about two weeks ago (it seems a beta was initially released in August or September of last year). Although I have my computer set to automatically check for and install updates every night, my box, for some reason, did not pick this one up on its own.

Instead, when I came home from work the other day, I found that my computer had “recovered from an unexpected shutdown”. When I clicked on the link to check for solutions, I was informed that the problem should be fixed with Vista Service Pack 1.

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As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently went through the trouble of restoring our family computer to its original factory settings in order to try to get a little better performance out of it. However, even after all of that work, the computer is still performing fairly poorly.

Therefore, I went to the Web to look for some fairly inexpensive options to upgrade the computer. I happened upon crucial.com. Now, I’ve heard the name of that Web site thrown around on a lot of forums, but I have never bothered to visit. In the past, it was fairly easy to purchase memory upgrades, because there were only a handful of different kinds, and every memory stick worked on every motherboard.

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The NY Times Design Manager Khoi Vinh has been answering a variety of questions over the past week from readers. Today’s question was most interesting:

Q: Regardless of platform or browser, NYTimes.com looks the same. This is not an easy feat to accomplish because of inconsistencies between browsers and how they handle HTML and CSS. How do you do it and with which tools?

— Neil Mansilla

A: It’s our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to “hand code” everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.

But really the browser-to-browser consistency that you see (and I have to admit, it’s far from perfect) is the result of a vigilant collaboration between many different groups — the visual designers and technologists in the design team that I lead, their counterparts in our technology staff, and the many, many detail-oriented people who come together to make the site a reality every hour of every day.

You may have heard a lot of horror stories about trying to network a new Vista machine with your old XP machines, and you may have even tried it on occasion with no joy.  I know I had.

However, this time around, I was determined to get it working properly.  I, once again, Googled for articles explaining how to network the two machines.  This time, however, I was able to find a somewhat recent article on the subject (in the past, the majority of the articles I came up with were written when Vista was still in its beta stages).  I followed the steps in the article and was 95% of the way to having my two computers networked together successfully.

The last two pieces of the puzzle for me, however, were: 1) setting the correct permissions on my Vista files and folders and 2) configuring my Norton 360 firewall to allow the networking to happen.

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Macworld is reporting that Adobe has discontinued operations of the GoLive product. GoLive was a visual HTML editor that, when launched, was popular with the designer crowd. The integration with the other Adobe applications (PhotoShop, Illustrator, etc.) was pretty good and overall the application did pretty well.

It’s interesting to note that in the late 90s visual editors were all the rage. Today it seems hand coding is back in style. Those who don’t handcode seem to use tools like Wordpress where no HTML is required to get up and running.

About a week ago, my parents provided me with the recovery discs that originally came with the eMachines computer they gave my family last year.  The computer has been running dreadfully slowly since they gave it to us, and it’s been getting worse by the week.

Of course, the kids are the main users of the computer, so I’m sure it’s become chock full of all kinds of tracking cookies, spyware, adware and everything else from the various things they try to download.  Therefore, I decided to completely reconfigure the computer, starting with the recovery disc.

I backed up the handful of files that were on the computer that I needed, and then restarted with the recovery disc in the drive.

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I’m not usually one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I’m a bit peeved with Google and their Analytics utilities.

For the past year or so, I have been using Google Analytics and have been extremely impressed with the reports it provides on all of my Web sites. However, there has always been one aspect of the Analytics utility that’s driven me crazy: the tracking code always causes javascript warnings.

I was hopeful, however, when I logged into my Analytics account today and noticed that Google is providing new tracking code for Analytics users. I copied the code and promptly pasted it into the template for one of my sites. Much to my chagrin, when I loaded the page in Firefox and checked my code debugger, I found that the new code produces just as many, if not more, errors as the old.

Why is it so difficult for these large organizations, including Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and so many more, to produce usable, clean, efficient, error-free code? Why do we have to continue putting up with these types of issues from organizations that probably employ more full-time coders than anyone else in the world?

UPDATE – I’ve added some screen shots of my error console after the jump.

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Browsing through your favorite library, or online store, you might say to yourself, “A book about phpMyAdmin? What’s there that I don’t know already?”.

Well I’ll tell you. Having worked with phpMyAdmin for the last seven years, I did only know about 10% of the options which are available in phpMyAdmin, if you want to use it to the fullest extent – and so promises the cover, “Increase your MySQL productivity and control by discovering the real power of phpMyAdmin.”

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