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Principle Centered Leadership, by Steven Covey

For the most part, this is a rehash of most of the concepts found in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. If you have read that book already then you already know most of what you will learn in Principle Centered Leadership. However there are a couple new/newly spun things, most notable of which is the abundance mentality. This is the concept that there are two types of people in this world: abundance thinkers and scarcity thinkers. Scarcity thinkers are always competing for limited resources and approach everything with a win/lose mentality. Abundance thinkers understand that resources, positions, and opportunities are not really scarce but are abundant and approach everything with a win/win mentality.

If you haven’t read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People then Principle Centered Leadership is a decent read and will help give a different perspective on the business world and life in general. However, if you have already read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People I would recommend foregoing the reading of this book and instead reading up on the abundance mentality theory.

I’m not a huge fan of Covey’s writing style. I can’t pin it down but there is something about it that makes it hard for me to stay focused on the book. If you have read Covey before and have had trouble staying engaged, this book will be no exception. If you read Covey before and loved it, this book will likely be right up your alley.

I feel that I must first disclose that Stylin’ with CSS was written by someone I work with. That said, I don’t feel that our work relationship swayed my opinion in any way.

I have been doing web development for a long time now and have played around with CSS quite a bit over the years. I can get a lot done with it but have always found that there were certain points that I would get to and just spin my wheels. When I change one property, something else stopped working. When I fixed the something else, the original change broke again. After reading this book I now understand why.

The first handful of chapters go over the way CSS works, its structure, and how browsers go about rendering it. An extremely important part of this is the explanation of hierarchies and relationships between elements. These chapters also focus on the different types of major elements, block and inline, and go into details about how each work. The remaining chapters go over things like how to achieve different layouts and effects and how to create reusable components. In addition to examples in the book there are a number of libraries that can be downloaded from the book’s website that will allow you to quickly recreate any effects in the book with minimal duplication of code.

If you have never heard about or touched CSS, buy this book. If you have just a little bit of web experience and want to learn more about CSS, buy this book. If you have a fair amount of web and CSS experience, consider buying this book. If you don’t know everything about CSS but are very comfortable using it, this is likely not the book for you.

In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions… When It Counts

This was a good book. It starts out by talking about the questions President Clinton had to answer during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and reviewed some rather tough questions he had to field during that time. The book then expanded to cover a formula for answering questions, tough or otherwise. Through reviewing a number of presidential debates and interviews the book gives plenty of examples of how and how not to handle various types of questions.

If you have ever taken a course in effective/strong/great presentations then much of this information will likely be review, as the concepts are not new. However, if you have not taken such a course the information contained within these pages truly is helpful in any situation where you must answer questions from anyone. As such, I would recommend this book to anyone who will ever be in a situation where they must handle Q&A. While this book is geared towards the CEO actively pursuing an IPO, it is written in such a way that it is relevant to anyone who would be in a presentation situation.