I am writing this from a hotel room in Winnipeg on the way to XP 2008 in Limerick, Ireland. Since I live 400 km (that’s 260 miles for the metric impaired) from Winnipeg and don’t drive, I typically have to endure a 4.5-hour bus ride at the beginning and end of every trip. You can imagine that I need to keep myself occupied during those stretches, which often involves my trusty iPod Touch. I used this trip to watch my first two Pragmatic Screencasts and they impressed me.

I started to watch a screencast on Expression Engine which I hadn’t heard of before, but as I get older I find building web sites less interesting, so I am always looking for ways to simplify the task. When I noticed this screencast I thought it would give me an idea whether Expression Engine would interest me as a web site platform. It does. Worse, I wanted to follow along with Ryan Irelan so much that I had to stop the screencast in frustration because I wasn’t at my computer and connected to the internet. I look forward to returning to that screencast next week, if I can wait that long.

The other screencast that caught my eye was building a chat system in Erlang. I tried reading the Pragmatic book on Erlang, and while that book receives excellent reviews, I just didn’t like it. I found it too abstract and didn’t stick with it. I like the author’s writing style well enough, but it just felt like I was reading the encyclopedia, rather than a tutorial. I needed an example to follow, and the screencast gave me just that. Kevin Smith builds a tiny chat system before your eyes and does so quite well. I found the screencast very engaging, not just because it illustrated the content and helped me finally begin to understand what Erlang is all about, but also because I found myself wanting to argue with Kevin about coding style, which I always enjoy. I look forward to watch the third episode a little later.

The quality of the screencasts is high, the production is good and they are a suitable length. Even on the small screen of an iPod Touch I found them easy to follow. I think that Mike Clark has done a very good job so far on both the vision and execution of these screencasts. I hope to do one or two for them sometime soon. (Hint, hint.)

Go to http://www.pragmatic.tv and enjoy. I think you’ll be very satisfied with the result.

It’s nice to see that nearly five years after I started writing JUnit Recipes, people continue to read and review it. I imagined it would have become obsolete by now, especially with the proliferation of Java 5, Java 6 and JUnit 4.

The review ends with “If you use JUnit as your test tool and if you do any of the ‘things’ covered in the contents list of recipes then I recommend getting hold of this book.” I appreciate it.

I’ve never been a manager, but if I became one, I know where I’d turn for advice. Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby’s excellent new book, Behind Closed Doors is the first management guide I’ve read that makes me feel like I could learn to be an excellent manager. It even makes me want to try to be a manager, something I swore I’d never undertake. I have spent most of my career seeing managers as an obstacle to doing good work, but Johanna and Esther have painted me a picture of a manager that is an ally, not an obstacle. If nothing else, Behind Closed Doors gives me hope for managers and their reports everywhere. But it’s not just a fairy tale—it’s a practical guide to manager/report harmony.

One important step Behind Closed Doors takes is to both show respect for managers and hold them accountable for their own performance. Rather than simply advocating for managers as unappreciated people, it identifies what good managers ought to do, then guides the reader to do it. Instead of siding with managers against “those annoying reports”, Johanna and Esther emphasize what their readers can do to develop better working relationships with everyone around them. When I think about the managers I have respected throughout my career, I realize that they already do some of the important things that Behind Closed Doors recommends.

The authors also make the point of using systems thinking to solve problems. Not only is this approach highly effective, but it encourages managers to view their environment holistically, rather than focusing on their direct reports, their manager, their turf, and nothing else. It encourages the managers to be better citizens at work, and this can only rub off on the people around them, creating lasting positive change. That’s quite an accomplishment, compared to other books for managers.

Most helpful are the 35 pages of specific guidelines and techniques the reader can start using right away to improve their communication, to both plan and manage their projects and to bring spiraling problems back under control. There are even plenty of examples of what not to do, which are effective teaching in their own right. No management book can promise to make managing easy, but Behind Closed Doors certainly makes it look possible to me, and that’s about as high praise as I can imagine giving a book on the subject.

Some gems from Behind Closed Doors:

• Evaluations are different from feedback
• People don’t know unless you tell them
• Don’t blame the other person for wanting what they want
• Management exists to organize purposefully

On a recent trip, I read Lasse Koskela’s Test-Driven, one of Manning’s latest releases. I opened it with the preconceived notion that there was nothing left for me to learn about Test-Driven Development, but Lasse presents the topic with a fresh perspective that I admire. Introductory text books tend to go stale, even after only a few years, and while Kent Beck’s Test-Driven Development: By Example remains a classic, Test-Driven provides a much-needed update to the literature. Koskela goes beyond the basics to give the reader a valuable overview of today’s TDD landscape, including an extensive section on TDD at the story level, current information on tools and more recent examples of test-driving Enterprise Java components and applications.

Test-Driven‘s overview is quite extensive; any reader is sure to be satisfied by its reach. It was an ambitious project, not one I think I would have undertaken, but Lasse has come through it gracefully. The result is a solid addition to the literature that TDD practitioners can heartily recommend to their novice colleagues. While I don’t agree with some of Lasse’s test design style, he has plenty of great things to say about TDD and designing Java code, and readers will benefit from his experience.

Lasse’s writing is engaging, his examples illustrate his points well and he doesn’t beat around the bush. If you like directness of approach and of exposition, then Test-Driven is for you. I give it 4/5 on the amazon.com scale and plan to add it to the bibliographies of my TDD-related seminars and courses.

I’m not sure why it keeps happening, because I don’t notice it much with other authors and their books. A number of times, I have seen people confuse Vincent Massol’s excellent book JUnit in Action with my book JUnit Recipes. Most recently, I found the error in Checking Java Programs by Ian Darwin, although his web site correctly refers to JUnit Recipes. I imagine that means that Ian knows about the error, but wasn’t able to fix it in time for his e-book. Shame.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy for the reference, but I feel bad for Vince when someone attributes his book to me. Please get it right, folks.