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Three non-programming books for your booklist

By Esther Schindler

September 1, 2010 — (Page 1 of 3)
While it's great to gain new programming skills, developers also need to advance their business abilities. It won't help your career if you're a brilliant programmer who can't talk with users, or a great designer who can't convince management to implement your suggestions. So when you create your reading list, be sure to include a few code-free books on the shelf. Here are three to explore.

Even if spend most of your time hiding out in a cubicle, at some point you need to get other people to agree to your strategy and ideas. Doing so doesn't always require giving a formal slide-based presentation. Often, you just have to convince someone to let you do things your way.

I can think of no better guide for this than "The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience," by Carmine Gallo. No matter what you think of the company or the man, Steve Jobs is an accomplished presenter. Wouldn't it be nice to gain some of his skills in creating a Reality Distortion Field of your own?

Yes, you'll gain some PowerPoint presentation skills, but most of the book is showing how to get people to listen to you. It is a wonderful put-it-to-use treatise about good leadership and passion—qualities that any developer should learn (even if only to identify the people with whom you want to work).

An entire chapter is devoted to dressing up the numbers by using analogies and by putting them into context. Gallo shows how to control how others perceive your announcement or message by creating Twitter-like headlines. The book is chock-full of examples (not all from Jobs' presentations, so you can see how other accomplished presenters succeed with the same methods), and each chapter summarizes the key messages to take away.

Ultimately, this book is about leadership. For example, he spends quite a bit of time discussing how Jobs has—and imparts—a messianic sense of purpose. Jobs' presentations don't aim to tell you about a product with new features. He communicates to the audience that by buying into his message, they are changing the world. People want to make a difference, Gallo points out, and Jobs helps people believe they're doing that.

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Third-party tools showcased at Professional Developers Conference
ComponentOne has a new development kit for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, while Infragistics created a version of NetAdvantage for Silverlight. Also, Developer Express and Microsoft announced a joint code-quality effort for C# Read More...

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