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Darrell Norton's Blog [MVP] » Random Observation #2
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Random Observation #2

I had my first (and only, until now) random observation way back in August 2003. I don’t know if this is necessarily a series since I am only averaging one every 9 months, but I’ll number it just for kicks.

What is up with books getting extremely short yet still costing some $40 US?

Since I haven’t posted anything on agile software development in a while, I was looking to purchase a book or two from Amazon to get me going again. So I looked at Ken Schwaber’s book Agile Project Management with Scrum. Now don’t get me wrong. I have met Ken in person and seen him speak at a conference before, and he is very sharp. And I thoroughly enjoyed his first book Agile Software Development with Scrum.

But $40 for 163 pages? That is a quarter ($0.25) for each page! At least his first book was only $27 for the same length. I'm not saying length is everything, but one of my graduate professors always said, “Too long does not always mean enough, but too short always means not enough.”

So I ended up buying Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products by Jim Highsmith instead. 312 pages for less than the cost of Ken’s book.

Posted Mon, May 3 2004 1:27 PM by Darrell Norton

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Comments

Brendan Tompkins wrote re: Random Observation #2
on Mon, May 3 2004 1:43 PM
Darrell,

I too have noticed this. Books may be going the way of corporate training and corporate only software. The more the market trends towards corporations, the more pricey the items become. Sooner or later we end up with those $1000 toilet seats like NASA did 20 years ago..

Somehow, I see this releated to Off-shoring. If the cost for us to gain the knowledege we need to become competitive is prohibitive, do we stand a chance against cheap labor from other parts of the world?

I know if I agree with your professor, though. I've see powerpoint slides that are enough. It all depends. Have you ever read Learning Perl? That book was a thin as a pamphlet, but taught me everything I know about the basics of software development.

-B
Darrell wrote re: Random Observation #2
on Mon, May 3 2004 1:54 PM
Brendan - length is relative, and notice I didn't put any quantities around what is "too short" or "too long"!

Programming books with lots of code can be shorter, since there is so much expressed in the terse symbolism of code. Describing software development, methodologies, best practices, etc., would likely take *more* length IMHO.

Take a look at Code Complete and Rapid Development, arguably two of the best software development books out there. Aside from the fact that McConnell is a voluminous writer, length makes these books a very worthwhile investment, *and* they are both cheaper than most books in the genre.
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