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Posts tagged book
New book: Power System Stability and Control
Jun 3rd
Today I received a book I ordered a couple of weeks ago. The funny thing about the book: It came in a very big post bag with nothing else in it. Just the book:
Big post bag
Power System Stability and Control by Prabha Kundur
The book is 2.2 kg heavy and consists of 1176 pages. Among some Power System Engineers it is also known as “the bible”. So enough stuff for me to read over the next couple of weeks. If you are interested in it, you can find it here on amazon.com.
FL!P
May 26th
Yesterday I finished reading another book. “Fl!p” from Peter Sheahan. Here is what I think about this book:
First of all, I really enjoyed reading the book. The style it is written in is very personal; while reading you can imagine the author sitting next to you in a bar and having a chat about economic possibilites. Sheahan has in my opinion a very fresh style of writing. Maybe this comes from the well known Australian mateship. Besides this the book gives the reader a lot of examples for everything he explains. Here he not uses his experiences as a consultant for companies like Google, BMW or Microsoft, but also personal experiences he made that are usefull to emphasize a relation, e.g. the relation between customers and a business. Of course he doesn’t leave out to refer to all known flipstars (or at least the ones Sheahan thinks they are).
The book consists of 7 chapters. I personally liked the chapters “action creates clarity” and “to get control give it up”. From my personal experience in some companies I can tell that the key aspects of these chapters are still not understood by (too) many people in management positions. The other chapters “fast, good, cheap: pick three – than add something extra” and “business is personal” were not so good. This is just because all the things he describes in here were already described by so many other books, and if there are still people out there who don’t get the message of how to deal with customers, I might even start my own consultancy to teach them the well known business basics. 
Though this book is not filled with completely new aspects, I think it is worth reading. It just makes fun to read it, and when you finished it you get this feeling that you really want to change something!
Even Buffett isn’t perfect
Apr 22nd
EVEN BUFFETT ISN'T PERFECT
That’s the title of a book written by Vahan Janjigian I finished reading just today. I bought it while I was on my way back from Melbourne to Darwin the last time. I was a bit early at the airport, so I got bored and bought the first book that looked interesting to me. Here is what I think about this book:
This book is a complete waste of time. There are a couple of things that make this book really a pain in the neck. Firs of all the style of it is just soooo bad. The author constantly repeats everything at least 5 times. Not only in each chapter you can often feel like having a deja vu. Throughout the whole book passages are repeated several times. Just the words used to describe are different. And then to top it all, at the end of each chapter the author sums the chapter up to the ‘key takeaways’. Each takeaway than has a comment that says the same like the key takeaway itself. You end up reading pages and pages that look like this:
The author writes about Warren Buffett, who is a great investor like we all know. As you find out later in this book, Warren Buffett is a great investor. But not only is Warren Buffett a great investor, there are also a lot of books about him. However this book also deals with Warren Buffet, the great long term investor.
Key takeaway:
Warren Buffett is a great investor.
Comment:
This book is about Warren Buffet, a great investor.
And this style of writing goes on and on and on. You know what i mean? This is not only annoying, but it also gives the reader the feeling that the author thinks everyone else but him is an idiot and that’s why he has to explain everything so often.
Furthermore, the book is nothing than a collection of well known facts. Nothing special, everything that is in this book can be found in the internet. Janjigian doesn’t go much in detail either. He just mentions one of Buffetts investments after the other. There is no single chapter that reveals something new or interesting. It’s just sooo unbelievable boring to keep on reading this book.
If this is “the best book on Buffett in years” as Lawrence Kudlow (CNBC) writes on its cover, I am very glad that I didn’t read the bad ones!
So, please save your money and do yourself a favour: don’t buy this book! 
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