Book Summary: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert comics)

The book聽is a humorous compilation of pragmatic lessons which Scott Adams learned while navigating his professional career. The author admits his failures as well as successes openly. He also talks about his personal medical problems - first his hand and then his speech.

Book Summary: Art of War by Sun Tzu (Samuel B. Griffith's translation)

The Art of War is considered one of the classic books on military strategy. Due to the recent resurgence of China as an economic superpower, the book has garnered interest聽from non-Chinese who are curious to know more about its strategy.

Book Summary: The score takes care of itself (my philosophy of leadership)

The book is written by Bill Walsh - San Francisco鈥檚 49ers Football team coach who transformed the worst-performing team of its era into the best-performing team. The book talks about the changes he brought in as well as his philosophy of leadership which is generic enough to apply outside of American Football. He is also known as the creator of the West Coast Offense.

Book Summary: Man's search for meaning

The book is the narration of the author鈥檚 life as a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camp.

Book Summary: Winners Take All (The 9 fundamental rules of high tech strategy)

The book聽Winners take all聽is a collection of interesting insights into how companies in the high tech sector succeed and fail. The book was written in 2006 (pre-iPhone era) so it鈥檚 interesting to see how some companies mentioned by the author (notably, Apple and Google) succeeded and how some others (notably, Symantec and Nokia) are struggling.

Book Summary: The Power of Less by Leo Babuta

The book contains pragmatic advice for dealing with the clutter and noise of the everyday world, which disguises itself in the form of work.聽The book has聽two parts. First one focuses on the principles and the second one provides concrete practical advice based on the same.

Book Summary: The Start-Up of You

The book tries to reflect on an individual鈥檚 professional growth in the contemporary era of fickle employment guarantees. The best part about the book is that it tries to offer pragmatic, as opposed to principled advice, regarding career development and branding.

Book Summary: Breakout Nations by Ruchir Sharma

The book provides a nice summary of economic events of the recent past (~50 years) and builds upon the case for the coming 10 years. The book is divided into 14 different chapters covering聽emerging聽as well as聽frontier聽nations, the latter being less liquid and smaller than emerging.

Book Review: The Tangled web

Just completed reading " The Tangled web: A guide to securing modern applications" by Michael Zalewski. The book is surprisingly small given the amount of information it covers about the interaction of web browsers, websites, and client-side web technologies. The book starts with a discussion of what a valid URL could look like (http://yahoo.com:80@google.com/microsoft.com - think which site is being connected to here) and then discusses several fundamental building blocks of the modern web (like cookies) as well as standard technologies (like Flash) in depth....

Book Review: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

The book is 50% story of Jobs and 50% history of the Valley. From the beginning of Apple to it becoming the world鈥檚 most valuable company, the book covers everything in depth (and is a bit too long) Some of the key things in the book are Steve Job鈥檚 fruitarian diet, journey to India, love for absolute minimalism, extreme (positive as well as negative) treatment of employees, relation with Bill Gates (and Microsoft), battle with Google, battle with cancer and a strong belief that normal rules simply don鈥檛 apply to him....