I was disappointed with this book. It has a reasonable overview of the history and growth of Wal-mart in the pre and post Sam Walton years. Unfortunately it takes a very high-level view (most of the figures it quotes can be gotten from the company's own annual reports or from other magazine articles), focusses more on culture (and even that is given short-shrift -- there is not a single dissenting view) than on business strategy or operational details. Perhaps this has been because the company is secretive, and perhaps by nature David Glass and Lee Scott (the Wal-mart CEO's that I assume were interviewed for the book) are low-key men -- but you get none of the retail, logistics, or IT-savvy insights that Wal-mart is "allegedly" exploiting to become the hypergrowth engine it is. Perhaps retail is all that the company purports it to be (sell product at value prices -- every day :), but I wish the author had peeked behind the covers and found a better story to tell.

I was tempted to chime in after reading a previous review that commended the author for his selections. I read the book and had the exact opposite reaction.

Perhaps I'm getting more conservative as I get older, but if this collection is the best representative writing from the defenders of "peace".. sorry, but I'm very worried.

Most of the selections (esp. the ones by Emerson, Thoreau, Gandhi etc.) are not their best pieces. They are either rambling or too short, and do not defend their positions adequately. In particular, they leave open the questions of "when is use of force justified?" and "how can one respond to a corrupt/despotic ruler that insists upon killing his/her opponents?" Personally, I think the author has hastily cobbled together writings from these "famous" writers, rather than actually examining/reading other pieces to cull the best defense. Granted, these writers are distinguished by their prodigious output, and selecting their best writings on peace is no easy task, but that's what I was expecting that Howard had done when we scanned and picked this book for our book club.

I was disappointed.

Adam Barr writes well. I found myself agreeing with several of his analyses: esp. his dissection of MSFT's evangelistic activities and his keen understanding of the api-itis that afflicts MSFT products today.

The book is in four parts. The first is a look at MSFT hiring and interview processes, which is followed by a description of his time at Softimage (which includes a brilliant dissection of type-1 through type-4 demos), then a long and meandering recounting of his early involvement with computers and then an equally meandering final part which is a compilation of his observations about MSFT and the industry in general. I found the first two interesting enough to read, but found the final two not as compelling. He completely mis-understands the point about middleware and Java (see Lou Gerstner's book "Who said elephants can't dance?" for a different definition of middleware and business strategy). Perhaps his narrow, unappealing and unfocussed second half meanders so much because he didn't take his chances to widen his own career within MSFT as a manager or PM.

Like Adam with his interviewees, I agonized over whether or not I should give this book a "four" or a "three" star rating :). Ultimately, I had to go with the lower rating because as a developer, I was hoping to read about what "he" had actually "learnt as a developer" when I picked up the book. Unfortunately, while he talks about a whole lot of things (such as the importance of testing for product quality, and the importance of programmers getting a 'life' as they mature, the contributions of MSFT to the open source movement, etc. etc.) he doesn't at all talk about what he worked on, what was exciting and new about NT code he may have contributed to, or how methodologies and practices changed while he was there. Maybe MSFT prevents people from talking about such stuff, but by cutting out such professionally interesting bits, the book becomes a "missed opportunity" (esp. since Adam is a self described "systems guy"). Perhaps he really was writing only for the non-programmer crowd (but I doubt it).