Mapping with Drupal by Palazzolo and Turnbull

Map­ping with Drupal by Alan Palazzolo and Thomas Turn­bull provides a hands-on, in-depth explor­a­tion of a the most pop­u­lar tools for turn­ing your favor­ite CMS into a geo­spa­tially enabled data man­age­ment sys­tem. Con­tex­tu­al­ising and demon­strat­ing mod­ules such as Geofield, GMap and Loc­a­tion mod­ules and the Open­Lay­ers framework, Palazzolo and Turn­bull  provide a superbly craf­ted guide­book to allow …

Head First WordPress by Jeff Siarto

Head First by Jeff Siarto is one of a superb series of Head First books that adopt a visual approach to teach­ing. This par­tic­u­lar volume is very well done and offers a deeply basic intro­duc­tion to set­ting cup, con­fig­ur­ing and man­aging a Word­Press blog. It takes a new user through the basics and then provides …

Keeping Score: Project Management for the Pros by Frank Ryle

Here’s a bit of a diver­sion from recent reviews. Keep­ing Score: Pro­ject Man­age­ment for the Pros by Frank Ryle is a lively, yet decept­ively pres­ci­ent look at adapt­ing a vari­ety of man­age­ment styles to the PM pro­cess. Using a nar­rat­ive centered on golf — both because it offers a shared pas­sion to the pro­ject managers …

Information Diet by Clay Johnson

The premise of the Inform­a­tion Diet by Clay John­son is: ‘What if we star­ted man­aging our inform­a­tion con­sump­tion like we man­aged our food con­sump­tion?’ And so it begins. This is a fas­cin­at­ing book framed as an open dis­cus­sion in which John­son car­ries along this meta­phor of inform­a­tion intake being likened to nutri­tional susten­ance. The initial …

Ten Photo Assignments by Amanda Quintenz-Fiedler

This is a superbly fash­ioned instruc­tion course for those who want to go bey­ond pho­to­graphic snaps and start to think about what makes a photo par­tic­u­larly remark­able. Although it won’t provide a simple for­mula to turn you into a pho­to­graphic expert, what it does do is provide a series of ‘assign­ments’ focus­sing of par­tic­u­lar aspects …

Big Data Glossary by Pete Warden

The *Big* Data Gloss­ary is actu­ally a rel­at­ively *short* book, best enjoyed as an eBook in my estim­a­tion. This volume is sim­ilar to a num­ber of recent releases from O’Reilly that have moved from being deep and com­pre­hens­ive to provid­ing a higher-level taste-test over­view from a more con­cep­tual stand­point. In this instance, the Big Data …

Designing Data Visulisations by Julie Steele and Noah Iliinsky

Insight­ful, sub­stant­ive and a must read for any­one work­ing with data visu­al­isa­tion as con­sumer or designer. Julie Steele andNoah Iliisky’s new volume — Design­ing Data Visu­al­isa­tions — from O’Reilly suc­ceeds in apply­ing a long over­due and well craf­ted taxo­nomic pro­cess to the art of Data Vis. Build­ing on their pre­vi­ous volume — Beau­ti­ful Visualisations — …

Revolution in the Valley by Andy Hertzfeld et al

Iconic and authen­tic. I remem­ber being mildly amused by the first incarn­a­tion of Andy Hertzfeld’s col­lec­tion of anec­dotes when it was first pub­lished. Revolu­tion in the Val­ley was an intriguing and enga­ging set of remin­is­cences by many of those involved in mak­ing the Macin­tosh a real­ity col­lec­ted from folklore.org. Newly re-released in 2011 here I …

Quick Guide to Flash Catalyst

Before I jump into the book I thought I would quickly note what my expect­a­tions are so that these are clear in the eval­u­ation. Flash Cata­lyst is a high-level web devel­op­ment tool that allows for cre­ation of flash-based web pages dir­ectly from Pho­toshop or Illus­trator. Although these can be deployed to pro­duc­tion envir­on­ments from what …

Anglo Republic by Simon Carswell

I wouldn’t typ­ic­ally review my more gen­eral read­ing mater­ial here, but Anglo Repub­lic: Inside the Bank that Broke Ire­land by Simon Carswell war­ran­ted an excep­tion. A thor­oughly sat­is­fy­ing and com­pel­ling read, Carswell doc­u­ments the rise and fall of the bank demon­ised by the Irish media in a superb fash­ion. Eagerly anti­cip­ated, the volume brings together …