Wise man are rare, but they exist and one of them is happy to share his wisdom with all tense CMS consultants and project managers to help them relax.

Martin Bauer is his name and Packt just published his book entitled Managing eZ Publish Web Content Management Projects. In fact, this book is a tremendous work of reference for any kind of CMS project, be it eZ Publish or not, proprietary or Open Source. Only two of 13 chapters actually deal with eZ Publish specifics.

The book contains a hand full lines of code, the rest is valuable information covering the whole life cycle of a CMS project, for example:

• Project cost estimates
• How to write a specification
• Project management approaches
• Implementation and testing
• Training
• Maintenance and support
• Risk management
• etc.

What makes the book such a great source of information is its valuable combination of experience and facts. Just a few insightful quotes:

If a developer continually gives me best-case scenarios, I’ll protect myself by adding 40% to the estimate.

So, you can accomodate some delays, additions, or changes but once it gets beyond 10% [of estimated project duration], the project will be in trouble.

Risk management itself is a risky activity, but an important one. It’s a bit like insurance; you can get away without it until something goes wrong at which point you wished you had done something earlier.

If you make the mistake of thinking that the team doesn’t include the Client, then chances are you’ll fall into the “Us and Them” syndrome.

From my past experience as a Senior Consultant at eZ Systems, the creator of eZ Publish, I can wholeheartedly recommend Martin’s book - it will help you a lot to successfully cope with implementing CMS-based solutions.

If I were Packt, I’d cut out the eZ Publish-specific content from Martin’s book and make it a general reference for CMS project methodologies. Based on that book, Packt could publish vendor-specific references (e.g. eZ Publish, Drupal, Typo3, etc.). That way, Martin’s book could become a classic.

Two bloggers of the eZ Publish community also reviewed Martin’s book.

Disclaimer: The publisher approached me and asked me to write a review of the book. I agreed not without making clear that I will express my opinion independently.

My favourite German publisher is dpunkt.verlag. Recently, a book on PHP 5 was published that I have helped them with and there are two others in the pipeline written by notable authors. The three books complement each other, so depending on your skill- set, you could pick one, two or all of them. Of course, each of them is of high quality:

PHP 5 für Fortgeschrittene

In a nutshell: For experienced devs, curious to learn PHP 5.

The 380 pages are a condensed, translated, and updated version of Harry’s excellent PHP Anthology. PHP 5 für Fortgeschrittene is meant for experienced PHP 4 developers who want to learn about what’s new in PHP 5 on a very practical basis. Actually, the strength of the book is that it takes care of the nitty-gritty when migrating from PHP4 to PHP 5 with lots of real-world examples.

It was actually me who did the updates, especially dealing with the new OO features in PHP 5. While writing the updates, I realized how the evolution of the book matches with the intention of the book to guide through PHP4-to-PHP5 migration issues, because all of Harry’s source code was PHP 4. Making the book PHP 5-focused, required me to work just like someone who sould migrate his PHP 4 application.

BTW: Cornelia Boenigk did a wonderful job in translating Harry’s text to German, I regard her as one of the best technical translaters of programming books from English to German.

PHP 5 für Fortgeschrittene is available since November.

dpunkt.verlag book info

Professionelle Softwareentwicklung mit PHP 5

In a nutshell: Makes a PHP 4-pro become a PHP5-guru.

This one should be out shortly. Sebastian Bergman wrote it and it is mostly an in-depth introduction to the OO-features of PHP 5. Sebastian let me review the pre-published version and I admire his precise and clean explanation of the sometimes inevitably complex topic of objectoriented programming. Everything important is mentioned, easy to comprehend, the sample code is of high usefulness. If you’re a PHP 4-pro, get this one to become a PHP 5-guru.

dpunkt.verlag book info

The book’s Website

PHP 5

In a nutshell: Gets you started with PHP 5.

I just finished to review the final draft of this one and got the impression that it is just what is needed to get PHP novices started. The authors are well-known members of the German PHP community: Hakan Kücükyilmaz, Alexander Merz, Thomas Haas. Throughout the book, they explain the important aspects of PHP 5 with patience, accuracy, and the knowledge of how a novice should be guided. Saying that, it comes with no surprise that the book is the result of several PHP training courses.

This book is out in March.

dpunkt.verlag book info

Some might argue, that these books are late as PHP 5 is already out for some time, but the strategy of dpunkt.verlag is to publish high-quality books - and they simply take time. This is what I experienced myself when writing for dpunkt.verlag: unless your text is perfect, they are not satisfied with the results and they will push you to make it perfect. A sometimes painfull, but in the long-run successfull strategy: educative for the authors, beneficial for the readers.

Contrary to other believes, Harry and me have certainly won the Battle of the Books. It was clear after some serious analyzation over a couple of swiss beer, that our book PHP für Fortgeschrittene is so much better compared to PHP de Luxe. Christian and Hannes had some good marketing strategy, but in the end, quality always wins

The location and event was really cool - thanks to Christian, Hannes and etoy for making this possible!

By chance, I found An Introduction to Radical Constructivism online. This article is part of the excellent book “Die erfundene Wirklichkeit” (edited by Paul Watzlawick) that influenced me a lot during my university studies.

Call constructivism my theoretical mantra It’s the only theory that does not attempt to explain reality and defines truths, but explains why we explain reality the way we explain it - and why we fight for a certain truth. It also serves as a perfect theoretical basis to understand “knowledge” as a social phenomena.

John Baronian from Edison Schools proposed Howard Gardner’s “Frames of Mind: The theory of multiple intelligences” to me and pointed me to the bibliography of Gardner writings. I plan to read it during my summer vacation.

During my stay in NYC I bought two books which are next on my list of must-reads:

“AI Application Programming” by M. Tim Jones: Seems like a very worth read to dive deeper into artificial intelligence programming. The paperback says “Covers cutting edge AI concepts such as neural networks, genetic algorithms, intelligent agents, rules-based systems, ant algorithms, fuzzy logic, unsupervised learning algorithms, and more”. The code examples are easy to follow. Met by chance Bruce Lokeinsky (whom I have not known before) while waiting in the queue to pay. He looked at my book, we started chatting about the real benefit of AI technologies. We are both skeptical, but I am confident that the KISS paradigm (keep it small, simple) of the open source community might break down those mainly scientific concepts to what can be done and is useful in the Semantic Web.

“Working Knowledge. How Organizations Manage What They Know” by Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak: Florian Stahl from University of St. Gallen pointed me to this book - thanks Florian! Obviously a classic that I haven’t come across before. It’s a shame, there’s so much I should have read already. The problem is that I often forget what I have read. Oh not, it’s not gone, it’s there for intuitive thinking. I go with Einstein, who said that it’s not necessary to know everything, but to know where it is written… So, let’s read how organizations manage this problem

Just in case you are looking for a profound introduction to distributed systems, I recommend the book “Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design” [1] by George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore, Tim Kindberg.

[1] http://www.cdk3.net/

I am currently reading a very good book on artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, it’s available in German only: “KI - Künstliche Intelligenz. Grundlagen intelligenter Systeme” by Klaus Mainzer. What I like about this book is that the author is far from assuming that computers can become intelligent in a way that human beings are. He rather defines intelligence on the basis of communication theory (the complexity of digital patterns) and physics/biology (entropy and autopoietic systems) and accounts for the difference of intelligent systems that evolved during evolution (e.g. human beings and computers).

For intelligence to take place, it needs an open system that can keep information flow, he states. Maybe someone wants to write a PhD based on these theories about the Open Source movement? Or maybe someone knows about such a thesis that has already been written, then please comment.