When I went to the post office to pick up the package, my first impression was that Amazon had mistakenly sent me an empty box. After quickly thumbing through the pages, I was starting to feel pretty good about not having spent the usual amount of cash I typically fork over for a good technical resource. Much to my surprise, I could not have been more wrong. The moral of the story is that you can’t judge a book by its size or price.
Layout ★★★★★
There’s a chapter dedicated to each of the 50 rules where the chapter starts with the what, when, where and why. That allows the first-time reader to quickly skim the chapters looking for the rules that are most important to their specific scenario.
There’s also a review and prioritization section at the end. Each rule is further categorized by risk reduction, cost and benefit. There’s also a list of the rules sorted by priority so you don’t have to go looking for the top n ways to achieve maximum benefit.
Content ★★★★★
The subject matter isn’t targeted to a narrow audience. Some of the rules apply to software engineering while others apply more to operations. There are even a few that product managers should keep taped to their desk as they define software requirements.
Readability ★★★★★
The language is informal and easy to understand with memorable little gems along the way:
Design for 20x times capacity.
Implement for 3x capacity.
Deploy for ~1.5x capacity.
Price ★★★★★
This book is available from Amazon in both paperback and Kindle formats for under $20.