I spent an hour or so in MIT Coop reading this book, and taking copious notes. Date’s central thesis is that the trend in computing is always from Procedural to Declarative, from ‘How?’ to ‘What?’.

The biggest bottleneck in creating applications is turning the requirements into a functional system. His solution: eliminate the code, and merely state your business rules declaratively.

He spends quite a lot of time explaining how this is not the same as writing lots of event handlers in a database (they’re difficult to write, even more difficult to debug, and are usually database events (‘do something when this record is updated’), rather than business events (‘do something when an order is placed’).

I found his taxonomy of rules very handy. In the simplest form, all rules are either Constraints or Derivations.

There three forms of Constraints:

1. State Constraints (Total Owed <= Credit Limit),
2. Transition Constraints (You can move from Married to Divorced or Married to Widowed, but not from Widowed to Divorced, or Divorced to Widowed),
3. Stimulus/Response (IF StockLevel – OrderedQuantity < ReorderLevel THEN reorder).

And two forms of Derivations:

1. Computation (LineAmount = QuantityOrdered * OrderPrice)
2. Inference (IF TotalOrders(c) > $100,000 THEN GoodCustomer(c))

If you can write a system that handles all these rules, then you can probably create 95% of business applications in a purely declarative manner.

I’ve been working for the last year on a framework that allows you to create database backed web sites mostly declaratively. You still need to do some Class::DBI set-up, although I’ve gradually made that less and less important, especially if you’re using a self-aware database, but after that you can create 90% of what you need for a reasonably complex site in a single config file. This book has given me lots of interesting ideas as to where I could take this next…

Tim Sanders is “Chief Solutions Expert” at Yahoo! and this books is, in part, his tale of how being a “lovecat” helped him get that job, and helped Yahoo! make lots of money. Whilst that section of the book, which takes about about the first third, is mildly interesting, I was much more impressed by the second section: “Knowledge”, which takes as its central thesis that you really need to read. Not magazine articles (the “between-meal snacks”), or electronic news (“candy and soda”), but real-life, dead-tree, books. Ideally in hardback (“A paperback is made to be read. A hardcover is made to be studied”). He spends a long time on how you know what to read, how to read what you’re reading, how to process what you’ve read, and how to apply what you’ve learnt. It’s all fairly basic stuff, but I’ve often been amazed at how little “professional” people actually read – particularly in the “computing” and “business” areas. If even encountered people who get offended if you suggest a book to them – as if you’re saying they’re not good at their job!

The rest of the book consists of fairly basic “Network” and “Compassion” sections (the book is classified as “Business – Motivational”, which is usually a bad sign IME), so I wouldn’t really advise buying it. But the “Knowledge” section is is worth a read, for people who don’t read. Getting them to read that of course is going to be the difficult bit.

I discovered at the airport that Barry Gibbons had a new book. He’s the ex-CEO of Burger King, and writes exactly in the manner that you would not expect of such. His previous books (“This Indecision Is Final : 32 Management Secrets of Albert Einstein, Billie Holiday, and a Bunch of Other People Who Never Worked 9 to 5“, and “If You Want to Make God Really Laugh, Show Him Your Business Plan” were both excellent. One Amazon reviewer puts it well:  “This guy writes with the wit and wisdom of Tom Peters and the hysterical observations and honesty of Dave Barry.”

This new book, “Dream Merchants and Howboys: Mavericks, Nutters and the Road to Business Success“, is no exception. He spends a chapter each on some of his business heroes – each one definitely a maverick, and many indeed complete nutters –  Luciano Benneton, Richard Branson, James Dyson, Steve Jobs, Herb Kelleher etc. There’s not a huge amount of research into these – in many of the cases where I’ve read more detailed biographies I could spot either inaccuracies or important omissions – but it’s a great introduction to many of them, told not only with great wit but also with passion. Gibbons obviously admires (almost) all of these figures immensely, and it shows.

Probably the only business book that made me laugh aloud on this trip!