Your Holiday Reading List

I can explain why some of them are on here if you have any questions. No order, just main title and author, many of these have subtitle/tagline I didn't include them.

The 4-Hour Body, Tim Ferriss
The 4-Hour Chef, Tim Ferriss
The Millionaire Fastlane, MJ DeMarco
Five Acres and Independence, Maurice G. Kains
Steal Like an Artist, Austin Kleon
Built to Sell, John Warrillow
Mastery, Robert Greene
Don't Go Back To School, Kio Stark
Trust Me I'm Lying, Ryan Holiday
The War of Art, Steve Pressfield
Linchpin, Seth Godin
The Icarus Deception, Seth Godin
Finite and Infinite Games, James P. Carse
Little Brother, Cory Doctorow
Pattern Recognition, William Gibson
Rules of the Game, Neil Strauss

Other people who may or may not have books but have really good online stuff which you should look into:
Noah Kagan http://okdork.com/
Neville Madhora http://www.nevblog.com/
Ramit Sethi http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/
Patrick McKenzie http://www.kalzumeus.com/
Johnny Pain http://www.strengthvillain.com/
Tim Anderson http://originalstrength.net/

Dream Job Program

Ramit Sethi's Dream Job program helped me get a new job.
Here is a video of me talking about it.

If you aren't part of the mailing list you are not going to be able to join.
You only have a few days until the program is opened back up. (Ramit also tends to increase the price after each opening.) Sign up here http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/dreamjob/

Guest Spot

I wrote an article for my employer Rural Sourcing Inc, you can read it here http://www.ruralsourcing.com/blog/post/2012/05/09/Ten-Thousand.aspx

Text-Fu Still Costs You Time

Even if you have great text editing skills it still cost you time. That is time you didn't spend coding, you spent it CRTL-V, CRTL-C, Alt-Mouse "Column Mode", CTRL-R, ... whatever.

Enter DataPivot.

 DataPivot only does one thing. It takes data and format it for use in a SQL WHERE clause.

Currently there is some formatting options of the SQL such as "Indent Lines", "Wrap after element X", and "Quote Elements" to aid in keeping your code clean.

You can download DataPivot at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14129654/DataPivot.zip.
You can download DataPivot's source at https://github.com/benjaminkwilliams/csharp-toys.

New Methods

If you want to ask me a question check out my page on Askolo http://askolo.com/williamsbk
I also have a new repo up on GitHub which will contain some simple tools which make my life easier when dealing with data or programming, check it out at https://github.com/benjaminkwilliams/csharp-toys
Last, I have an About.Me which links to most if not all of the services I use, the link is http://about.me/benjamink.williams

How to Reject The Wrong People, Quickly

Noah Kagan (@noahkagan, #3 Mint, #30 Facebook, Founder AppSumo) shows you how reject 90% of the people that apply for a job without ever talking to them in AppSumo Hiring Secrets.

The video is only 25 minutes but worth it. Noah walks through the process of hiring a personal assistant, going from over a thousand applications to only calling two people. This allows him to focus on running his business instead of reading resumes in Microsoft Word.

His system is based on the idea that a person that works hard on the job application and interview will also work hard on the job itself. Noah says that if I ask for a Skype number and you don't have one, just go create one, be proactive.

The AppSumo Hiring Secrets system is the employer's version of Ramit Sethi's Briefcase Technique.

If you get the video by next November 19th, 2011 it will only cost you $49. If you don't get it, it will cost you time reading resumes with bold buzzwords and talking to people who shouldn't be working for you.

Get the AppSumo Hiring Secrets by clicking here.

P.S. Check out the introduction video on YouTube below.

Wish List

This is my wish list in the O'Reilly Media contest; the only prize if $500 worth of O'Reilly Publishing books. You can read about it here.

The following titles are in ebook format and the latest edition.

• Beautiful Data
  
• Beautiful Visualization
  
• Beautiful Code
  
• Beautiful Security
  
• Beautiful Teams
  
• Beautiful Testing
  
• 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know
  
• 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know
  
• The Art of Application Performance Testing
  
• The Art of Concurrency
  
• The Art of Capacity Planning
  
• Hadoop: The Definitive Guide
  
• Refactoring SQL Applications
  
• Applied Software Project Management
  

SQL Pocket Guide 3rd Edition

Title: SQL Pocket Guide, Third Edition
By: Jonathan Gennick
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Formats: Print Ebook Safari Books Online
Print Release: November 2010
Ebook Release: November 2010
Pages: 208
Print ISBN: 978-1-4493-9409-7 | ISBN 10: 1-4493-9409-4
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-4493-9437-0 | ISBN 10: 1-4493-9437-X

[O'Reilly, Amazon]

SQL Pocket Guide is a way of getting to know the SQL language on a variety of common platforms. You quickly get to know each keyword and the output you should expect. You will not, however, learn the “best” way to write SQL code.

Gennick in this third edition covers Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgresSQL keywords; some in depth some with “see your vendor’s documentation”. His overview is similar to what I would expect to get from a User Group lecture or a one day class at a University. If you are new to SQL code you should be able to understand keywords meanings and their usage.

The layout of chapters is by subject and then by keyword, so that you learn what SELECT, TIMESTAMP, and INSERT do. Gennick informs you of vendor differences but there is not a summery section. Some areas like date and time would make such a table nearly unusable as “Datetime support varies wildly amount platforms; commonality is virtually nonexistent.” SQL Pocket Guide is a good overview of the SQL language for the most common vendors.

Reviewed as part of the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program.