Two Practical Books
July 1, 2006 —
(Page 1 of 2)
I’ve been itching for a while to talk to you about the following two books, which have both impressed me a lot. They fall slightly outside of pure software development, but they deliver practical, hands-on information that most every one of us can use.
“Time Management for System Administrators” by Thomas A. Limoncelli (O’Reilly, 2006) appears to be yet another instantiation of the self-help book that promises to teach us how to “work smarter, not harder.” The trouble with most of those books is that they are endlessly repetitive. They take one or two good ideas and then present them over and over in varying forms of testimonials and anecdotes until 200 pages later, you wonder why if the author could work smarter, he didn’t present the same matter in just 10 pages. Limoncelli eschews this approach of constant retelling. His book is crammed with good ideas that derive from the day-to-day life of administrators and other support personnel.
Because he writes from the perspective of a techie, the tips and suggestions ring true. (As opposed to the self-help books, which always appear to be oriented toward salespeople and business executives.) Because the setting is familiar, the tips and techniques also have immediate applicability. For example, Limoncelli explains how to stagger sysadmin shifts and divvy up responsibilities among the team, so that one person each day has a long block of hours to tackle the hard problems that require extensive, uninterrupted effort. The author also addresses time-management chores that will be very familiar to all of us: prioritizing tasks, making meetings more efficient, managing e-mail. And he integrates familiar technologies: how best to use your PDA to streamline daily activities, using Wikis to get docs posted quickly, automating repetitive tasks via scripts, and so forth.
The book is an easy read, and at a suggested retail price of US$24.95, well worth the time and cost. It has a few limitations, however.
The sysadmin material is all Linux/Unix-oriented, so many of the examples will not apply to Windows, even though the ideas behind them have obvious, direct parallels. The author also comes across as young in certain ways: He rarely discusses topics related to management, and he occasionally throws in sophomoric items (such as a life goal of “dating a porn star”). These quibbles aside, any techie in the trenches will find the book far more useful than all the other “time management” handbooks available today.
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