Jon Udell

I remembered this book in the context of a conversation this morning and realized I needed to add it here. I'm disappointed to see what low marks it has here on Goodreads, given how important this book was to me early(-ish) in my career. In terms of technology, this book is certainly VERY dated, but it is filled with important ideas and approaches, some of which we take for granted now and many of which have still not seen the light of day. I probably have the timeline wrong, but if I recall correctly, this book came out around the time that P2P networks seemed to be the next big thing. And yet, here were are at a time when a large percent of what the more radical uses of P2P have still not really taken hold. But there's no doubt there is still much value to be gained from them. If you ever want to get a snapshot-in-time view of what was considered fringe approaches to doing business collaboratively, you should read this book, but also go spend some time reading about the historical context around it: check out Ward Cunningham's Portland Pattern Repository (the original wiki); investigate the state of the P2P revolution that was supposedly taking place around the turn of the millenium (important search terms: Groove Networks & Ray Ozzie, gnutella, Napster, Freenet, SETI@Home, and of course BitTorrent (these P2P applications were indicators, if not direct precursors, to many of the so-called NoSQL technologies around today.

Read this, if you get a chance, but only do so if you have or can "retrieve" (through friends who were around or through your own studies) the historical context that surrounded it.… (meer)