4 Books Reviews

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable

In this book, Seth Godin shows how being remarkable should be enough for an advertisement to your business. Stumbling upon a Purple Cow in your way will grab your attention without it making any effort advertise itself. The same should be the case for your business. I generally like Godin's blog and books, and this one is not bad, but it was very repetitive. I felt really bored half way through it. May be I am too late to read it now, hence, the boredom. After few chapters in the book, I started to feel that book itself and its message are not becoming a purple cow to me anymore.

I gave the Purple Cow 2 stars on GoodReads.

Design Crazy

This book is about Steve Jobs Inc., better known as Apple Inc., and how the company's obsession with design and the tiniest details in their products was the key to their success. THe book format is a bit strange. The author, Max Chafkin, interviewed a number of people who worked with Jobs, and each chapter is just a sequence of quotes from them, where those quotes together form a coherent narrative. You might not feel comfortable with such a format at the beginning, but later on, I found it nice. The book as a whole is well written, ehm, curated, and the Kindle edition is less than on quid on Amazon. The book is more of a biography than anything else, by the way.

I gave the Design Crazy 3 stars on GoodReads.

City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There

I liked reading this book. It has lots of interesting ideas about how to transform cities using individual initiatives or wisdom of the crowd. Each chapter is in the form of an essay, so it is more of a collection of essays rather than a book, that's why it is less coherent, and ideas are not glued well together. Would love to read a proper book out of this done by urban researchers who can pour in some analytical and theoretical aspects to glue all ideas here into a more interesting book.

The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization

Rather than wasting your time reading my review here, just go and buy this book now. I loved it so much. The title says it all. In this book, Alberto Cairo will take you in a trip showing you how to represent your data into graphical format. You can call it a guide book, since he touches bases with interactive design, graph theories, cognition and mental models. I read it out of interest in the topic, however, I believe others who might not be interested in the information graphics can still read, and enjoy it.

I gave The Functional Art 4 stars on GoodReads.