Eric Raymond starts with the history and culture of hackerdom. He says hackers build things. He reflects upon his development of fetchmail and observations on open-source development of Linux community. It’s composed of five essays overall, with the essay “The Cathedral and The Bazaar” being the highlight of the book. It contains great advice for software engineers. Here are some gems from the book:

• Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
• You often don’t really understand the problem until after the first time you implement a solution. So if you want to get it right, be ready to start over at least once.
• Adding more programmers to a late project makes it later.
• Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
• An important trait of the great ones is laziness. They know that you get an A not for effort but for results, and that it’s almost always easier to start from a good partial solution than from nothing at all.
• Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
• You have to listen to your customers.
• The best hacks start out as personal solutions to the author’s everyday problems.
• In gift cultures, social status is determined not by what you control but by what you give away.

He concludes by saying “You can learn language features from books, but the mind-set that makes that knowledge into a living skill be learned only by practice and apprenticeship. What will do it is (a) reading code and (b) writing code.”

I attended the inaugural Silicon Milkroundabout event along with hundreds of developers to get to know some of the startups in London’s technology scene.

This event reminded me of career fairs at Georgia Tech, with hundreds of companies seeking to recruit the brightest students. Career fairs were very brutal in the US, students would wear suits, engineers from companies would ask technical questions right on the spot, even make you write code on a piece of paper while standing up in line.

The original title of this book was “Ahead of the Curve”, now it’s titled “What They Teach You at Harvard Business School”. It describes the author’s love-hate relationship of going through HBS. I found the book to be thrilling because it makes you feel like you’re a student at HBS. It also reminded me of my graduate school days at Georgia Tech.

I picked up this book to get a feeling of what an MBA education at a top school is like. It’s very detailed, both touching on the subjects being taught, as well as his personal relationships with other people in HBS. I learned a lot of interesting facts about HBS such as:

The original title of this book is “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good”. It’s supposed to be about Web 2.0 era companies such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Digg. After the movie Social Network, the shady UK publisher wanted to ride the hype that was created by the movie. If you’re looking for Facebook’s story, I recommend reading The Facebook Effect instead.

This book is centered around Max Levchin (PayPal, Slide) and Marc Andreessen (Netscape, Opsware) and PayPal mafia. Stories related to Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson from Digg and Sean Parker, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook constitute a big part as well. The most interesting fact I learned from this book was that one of the first P2P networks KaZaa later resulted in the birth of Skype. Janus, one of Skype’s cofounders, dropped out of high school and was hired by the other cofounder for the help desk of KaZaa.

Business Model Generation is a book about business model innovation. What makes this book unique is that it’s beautifully designed, illustrated and enriched with pictures. The author wanted to stand out in the strategy and management books market, and the beautiful design of this book is its unique selling point.

The book is organized into canvas, patterns, design, strategy and process sections. It starts by describing building blocks of a business model such as value proposition, customer segments, distribution channels etc. Next, it describes patterns in business models such as the long tail, free as a business model, multi-sided platforms and analyzes these patterns in terms of the building blocks with examples from real world companies. Design section talks about techniques that help you design better business models, such as customer insights, prototyping and storytelling. Strategy section is about evaluating business models, with examples from Amazon, Nintendo Wii and Nestle.

Do More Faster is a book for startup founders written by Techstars community, a mentorship-driven startup accelerator. The book is organized into seven themes, which correspond to important aspects of a startup: Idea, People, Execution, Product, Fundraising, Legal and Work-Life Balance. Each theme consists of 15 short essay written by different authors, each 3-4 pages long. My expectations were very high for this book, because (i) startups are one of the most interesting subjects for me right now (ii) Techstars run a mentorship organization which means they have tons of experience to share.

I’m quiet picky when it comes to buying books, however buying “Delivering Happiness” was an impulse decision. As I was skimming through the pages of this book at the bookstore, Tony convinced me to buy it with this sentence: “For college, I applied to Brown, UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Cornell, Yale and Harvard. I got into all of them.” It turned out to be a very good decision, because I enjoyed this book a lot. It combines personal story telling with lessons learned and good business advice.  He combines his personal story with the companies he founded and sold, LinkExchange and Zappos.

I was always more impressed by Google, because of its contribution to technology and company culture. So I read books about Google like “The Google Story” and “The Search”. Before watching the Facebook movie, I read old articles dating back to 2004 about Zuckerberg in Harvard’s student magazine, The Crimson. It was cool to see internet history. Watching “Social Network” helped me realize that there were many interesting details about the early days of Facebook as well. I became more intrigued after watching the movie, so I decided to read “The Facebook Effect”. The book covers different aspects of the early days compared to the movie, and moves on to the later stages of the company as well. It contains first-hand information, with many names and details, which makes it real and valuable. It made me as if I was part of the early days, and was a great motivational read. I even learned a few lessons from this book. Since the early days, they made very correct strategic moves that determined the success of the company:

Guy Kawasaki’s Art of The Start is a book for entrepreneurs. It contains guidance about different phases of a startup, such as positioning, pitching, writing a business plan, bootstrapping, recruiting, raising capital etc.

One cool fact about this book is that he did a competition to choose the book cover. Alternative covers that were not chosen are also included if you look at the back-side of the book cover. In a way, Guy Kawasaki was doing crowd-sourcing in 2004 :)

Jason Fried and David H. Hansson of 37signals have been an inspiration to the startup community with their strong stand on how they do business. Their first book “Getting Real” targeted developers of web-based software. Rework, their latest book, contains more generic ideas that could be useful for any small business. It consists of 100 ideas, each 2-3 pages long. If you have been following their talks and blog, you’ll see many ideas repeated over and over. I bought this book knowing that I won’t find many new ideas, however it’s nice to have all these gems distilled together in one book. You’ll be reading things you already know, but the important thing is to apply these ideas to your life. I’ll leave you with 10 of my favorite ideas extracted from this book: