Posts Tagged ‘books’
I'm thrilled to announce that the online book by Adam Pash and myself, The Complete Guide to Google Wave, is now in print! Order your copy here.
The new edition is double the pagecount of the Preview PDF released last fall and it's packed with screenshots and examples. In this expansion, Adam and I went out of our way, page after page, to illustrate the answer the most common question about Wave: "What is the point?" We added two new chapters, completely rewrote several existing chapters, and since the book is now available in print, added an index for easy reference. We scored a Foreword from one of my web heroes, Lars Rasmussen, who with his brother Jens created Google Maps and Google Wave.
The coolest part of this DIY undertaking is that a portion of print book sales go to a great cause. San Diego-based charity Partnerships with Industry fulfills our print book orders. Instead of sending half the cost of the print book in an existing online print-on-demand service, your book dollars create a job for adults with developmental disabilities in my community.
The new edition of The Complete Guide to Google Wave is available as both a PDF ($9) and a print book ($25) and on the web site (free). If you've already purchased the Preview PDF, to thank you for your early support, we're upgrading you to the First Edition PDF for free. Keep an eye on your email inbox for that. If you haven't already bought a copy, order one here. Thanks for checking it out, and I hope you'll let us know what you think.
The Complete Guide to Google Wave
San Diegan Self-Publishes First Google Wave Book [NBC San Diego]
37signals' new book Rework is a fast, inspiring read for anyone who's thought about starting a business but froze at the idea of quitting their job, getting investing, and working 24-hour days.
As they do every day at their blog, in Rework the Signals break down their minimalist philosophy into a series of essays written in uncompromising language. Expect a table of contents full of sections entitled things like "Learning from mistakes is overrated," "Planning is guessing," "Outside money is plan Z," "Throw less at the problem," "Skip the rock stars," and "Meetings are toxic." While it's billed as a business book, at its core Rework is a get-up-off-your-ass, stop-talking-and-start-doing book--a productivity book that uses 37signals as its main case study.
People who follow 37signals online know that they are opinionated and contrarian--sometimes to the point of abrasive. At least one person thinks their small business philosophy is downright dangerous. Personally I give 37signals credit for having a strong point of view, a well-executed shtick, and for having shipped some fantastic software products. (At Lifehacker we lived in Campfire.) My advice? Take the book with a grain of salt. After reading it you don't have to cancel every meeting you have at your company. But, if you shorten a few, you've gotten something out of it.
To get a taste of how the book reads, download this PDF excerpt with essays on why workaholism, business plans, and meetings don't work. The book is available today in bookstores and on Amazon.
Rework
Got a great response to last week's frequently asked questions about Google Wave, and it's worth expanding further on the differences between Wave and the current crop of web-based collaboration offerings.
Wave combines features from email, instant messenger, Google Docs, wikis, and forums and throws its own spin on things. For a quick visual of its offerings versus similar tools, check out this feature-by-feature comparison.
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I'm tickled pink to finally announce the project I've been hard at work on for weeks now: my new book, The Complete Guide to Google Wave, is now available to read and share for free at completewaveguide.com.
Anyone who reads my stuff or listens to This Week in Google knows that I'm a Google Wave nut. Yes, it's a hyped, complex, do-it-all web application, but the sheer ambition is part of Wave's appeal for me. Since I logged onto Wave's developer sandbox back in June, I've spent a whole lot of time in Wave, figuring out how it works and what it might do--and blogging about my discoveries just didn't cut it. So, along with Adam Pash from Lifehacker, I've compiled everything we know how to do in Google Wave in a book format at completewaveguide.com. I'm calling it a book, but for now it's just a web site--with eight "chapters" and two "appendices," free for you to read, share, and if we're lucky, help us expand. The site will grow into traditional book formats, however: thanks to the team at 3ones, a PDF version of the book's preview edition will be available for purchase this month. In January of 2010, a softcover print version of the book's first edition will be available as well as an updated PDF. Adam and I have committed to four editions throughout 2010, so the book will change and evolve along with Wave. The latest and greatest version of the book will always be available for free at completewaveguide.com.
I turned down a request-for-proposal from my traditional book publisher to try this experiment in iterative self-publishing. I ran down the whole story of why on the book's About page. This approach scratches several itches I've had for years: I've always wanted to publicly collaborate on a book using MediaWiki, try my hand at self-publishing, and license a book under Creative Commons. Now, to see how it will all turn out. Check out the book and let me know what you think. (Also, follow @gwaveguide on Twitter for Wave tips and book news.)
Amazon Pulls Already-Purchased Books from Kindle · Wow, this is one good way to make me rethink how much I like my Kindle: Due to an issue with a publisher who didn't want to offer an electronic version after all, Amazon remotely deleted purchased books from readers' Kindles and refunded the money. Yikes! · July 17th, 2009, 8 comments
I've got my own pie chart of how I want to spend my time, so it was fun to hear that Jim Collins, author of bestselling book Good to Great, also has a similar breakdown, pictured right. The New York Times reports:
That, he explains, is a running tally of how he’s spending his time, and whether he’s sticking to a big goal he set for himself years ago: to spend 50 percent of his workdays on creative pursuits like research and writing books, 30 percent on teaching-related activities, and 20 percent on all the other things he has to do.
Collins is a whole lot more diligent about tracking his progress than I've ever been, though.
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Once you've amassed enough of a following, one of the best uses of hot social networking app Twitter is getting instant answers to any question on your mind. When you post a question on Twitter and get a dozen replies within the next 10 minutes from live humans--some of whom you know and trust--it's waaayyy better than impersonal and sometimes out-of-date Google search results.
After two years and 1,700 updates on Twitter, this insta-Q&A is my favorite use of the service. The only problem is, I always want to archive and share what I learn from my followers on my blog, and it's not easy. My post on what people love and hate about netbooks, sourced entirely from Twitter replies, took me hours to compile manually, because Twitter doesn't easily list replies to a particular "tweet" in a very readable or republishable format. So this weekend I dug into the service's API to make that happen. Using Kevin Makice's new book, Twitter API: Up and Running, after just a day of coding I had my entire Twitter archive plus replies ready for viewing and publishing. While the code itself isn't ready for sharing, a few questions and subsequent replies posted on Twitter and compiled here recently include:
Update: I've posted a pre-alpha, nerds-only version on GitHub, tentatively named Twitalytic, called ThinkTank.
Of course, I included only replies from Twitter users whose updates are public, and I didn't include direct messages (because, by nature, they are private). I hope to post more lists of curated public replies going forward; I'll file future posts under "Twitter Q&A." Let me know how I can make posts like these more useful and readable.
Stanford graduate Ramit Sethi's personal finance blog, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, is one of Lifehacker's most-quoted sources of financial advice, so I was honored when Sethi asked me to contribute a bit to his new book, also entitled I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Sethi's direct, authoritative style (evidenced by the blog and book title) may put you off at first glance. But on closer inspection you'll find he's an approachable, sensible guy, not some jerk trying to sell you a "foolproof" make-a-million-dollars-a-month system.
In fact, the I Will Teach You To Be Rich book, which went on sale today, is an excellent graduation gift for the college students in your life who are venturing out into a horrible economy steeped in student debt. To get a taste of what it's like, download the introduction PDF for free.
When you do get the book, you can find my contribution on page 134, a short piece on how I automate my week-to-week transactions in order to set and track long-term goals. Here's a full reprint.
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Amazon's announcement of the Kindle 2 e-reader has book-lovers in a tizzy again, wondering how anyone could give up timeless paper-based books for the electronic version. Thing is, no one has to give up anything. I've got shelves of books and a Kindle, and I'm reading more than ever--mostly because of the Kindle.
Someone who's never actually read a book on the Kindle focuses on the things you can't do with it. Your favorite author can't autograph a book on the Kindle. You can't dog-ear pages. (Though you can virtually bookmark pages on the Kindle, the autograph point is true.)
But that same someone is often surprised by the stuff you can do with a Kindle book. When you encounter a word you haven't seen before, you can look it up in the built-in dictionary in two clicks. (As a vocabulary nerd, this is the feature I love most.) You can highlight sections of the book as you read which get saved to a text file on the device. Then you can import the text of those paragraphs to your computer for stowing away in your favorite note-taking application or to include in your book journal or blog review.
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