Let me tell you, I have been as busy as a one legged man in an ass kicking contest.

Yes, the new year has been that crazy, both in work and outside of work. It is a very exciting time as a lot of cool things are starting to gel at work, and a lot of new gigs are starting to gel outside of work. But it all results in a lot of work, and I am burning the candle from both ends.

If you haven’t been following my 12 day “twitching eye marathon”, feel free to follow me on Twitter.

• Random Thoughts On Humility and Perfection – Very thoughtful post on egos by Joey and nicely followed up by a Bellware comment
• Don’t Think You Know More Than You Do – Another good post by Miller about knowing your role when it comes to the business and domain side of software
• Breaking A Stalemate – Quick and simple advice for breaking up a stalemate
• The Sesame Street Presentation Rule – Not my most favorite Atwood post ever, but giving Sesame Street representation to the blogosphere deserves a round of applause
• Monty Python and Software Requirements – For a quick laugh…

For those who didn’t catch the move, Russell Ball has moved his blog Caffeinated Coder from Geeks With Blogs to his new Word Press home.

Apparently, the move wasn’t as smooth as he hoped and a lot of readers have been dropped as a result of bad 301 redirects and so forth. So if you read Russell’s weekly sarcasm (which is the only reason I have left to continue living…I want to have your love child Russ) and didn’t get noticed of the big move feel free to pop over and check out his new digs as he is currently holding a cool contest for a free R# license!

During the last squeezed reader awards, Burke Cox (CEO of Stelligent) was very kind and sent me a signed copy of Paul Duvall’s new book – Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk.

I was really looking forward to this book for two reasons. First, the topic was right up my alley and was very excited to what I could learn. Second, I wondered – what the heck could you talk about at a books length on this subject?

Chapter List

1. Getting Started
2. Introducing Continuous Integration
3. Reducing Risks Using CI
4. Building Software at Every Change
5. Continuous Database Integration
6. Continuous Testing
7. Continuous Inspection
8. Continuous Deployment
9. Continuous Feedback
10. The Future of CI

The Good

• Good book about explaining all the different aspects of the lifecycle that you can apply CI
• Written to be easily digested much like Pragmatic Programmer series books
• Introduced new ways for CI to be used socially

The Bad

• Not brief enough which carried unnecessary conversation
• The core messages became repetitive quickly
• Book direction seemed to bounce around and never felt as if I was being lead through the application of CI in order of execution

Overall, my feelings about this book were mixed. First, I love the fact that someone finally took the initiative to write a book on this topic. On the other hand, books like Ship it! were much better at explaining this concept at the correct length – brief.

In short, all I can say is that this book has value but what you will get out of this book is completely dependent on your previous exposure to this topic. For me, I was slightly disappointed, but then again I have been doing CI for 5 years and am always very “socially aware” of software. Others who have never done CI in any fashion (technically or socially) found the book as a great new insight.

Some my find gold nuggets in it, others may find it old news, but at least give it a good thumb through and decide for yourself.

Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk

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