As I've been blogging so much about books lately, I thought it would be valuable to share the best books I read 2013. From these books only one was published this year, so it's not a review of best books of 2013, but what I read year 2013. All of these are books I'm really happy I read. All of those changed my world and view of the world. Here the list and few words why I think those were so important. I highly recommend all of those.
I've been familiar to systems thinking before the book, but this was the book that fully opened my eyes. This book works bit like the famous "
red pill vs blue pill" scene from Matrix which promises to show the world as it is. Systems thinking should become a mandatory subject to school, it's so important.
I'm mainly sad that I didn't read this book earlier. This is a book everyone in SW industry should try to understand. It's not easy to read and it's even harder to understand. It gave me so many new ideas how to improve SW development organizations. I'm sure it had good thoughts for everyone else too.
Green Illusions opens eyes about the state of the world currently. There are many controversial thoughts in the book and I didn't believe everything as such, but that doesn't matter. I believed the main point, world has a consumption problem. To fix consumption problem we should put much more focus to different things that
we are currently doing. Today's economy is based on consumption and supporting cheap energy. How should we change this? Read the book and think yourself.
This book I enjoyed the most in the whole year. It's the first book over 400 pages that I wouldn't have liked to finish. It is packed with so much information about current technology and future predictions, that I bet all the tech freaks will love the book. The author is very familiar how hard it is to try to guess the future, but him if anyone in the world have information and sources to make good guesses. If there would be more books like this existing, I would read many of those in a row.
To Sell Is Human was an excellent book. It goes through some of the same topics Daniel Pink has been writing already previously. Dan Pink writes good stories and every book from him is a fun to read. Also the books are filled with really important information. I'm still honest to myself, this book got to the list because Daniel Pink is my favorite author. I've read almost everything he has written and his writing doesn't light me up as they used to. I still own him so much. His books have been the ones that got me back to reading again. I hope this book could do the same for someone else.
Written by +Henri Hämäläinen
