laptak2003/AmazonDataScience huggingface dataset:
Opinionated primer for the technically unsophisticated and those who are looking for SV formula reinforcement for the 'cloud native' world. Functional programming, Randian supermen and C level celebrity are as far as I got before I unplugged. for those who actually have done the work in the back office and systems architects who deal with core infra rather than enterprise IT this book is a reminder of why all these revolutions (container, devops) have gained traction: simplistic, abstract solutions endorsed as evolutionary principles in self serving tracts like this one.
Overall, I think it's an average book. To me it didn't have the power of his other books, especially The Phoenix Project. For those stuck in a large enterprise where you're at the mercy of external siloed teams will enjoy this book more than others. I think many of us old fogies who have worked in the old-style enterprises feel a little nostalgia with the horrors we experienced. To me though, this book didn't flow like The Phoenix Project. It almost felt like the writing was hurried to meet a deadline. Even when it started to flow, that flow was broken with random paragraphs of why functional programming is the best. The evidence presented was even more strange. We should all write functional code to avoid off-by-one errors. My retort is does Gene Kim actually believe someone that can't terminate a for loop properly can actually terminate recursion properly? It just seemed like there were Gene Kim soap-box moments that felt out of place.
I was lucky enough to receive a pre-release copy. I thoroughly enjoyed this magnificent book. It was so recognizable for the revolution I am part of. I will make sure that lotâ€™s of â€˜bridge employeesâ€™ will read it since thatâ€™s where the change needs to be done.I cannot stress enough how well written and important this book is. And remember, fast and big wins almost every time. There is still hope for enterprises in the current DevOps world :-)
Very much like The Phoenix Project, but for me much better.  Probably because it resonated more with the trials and tribulations of  a developer rather than a project manager.For me, it was fascinating that situations were described that "on paper" you'd think "no, this could never happen.  no one is that stupid.  no company would DO that!"  You WANT to believe that this is just drama to sell a book.  But if you have much experience you'll know...  yes, that happens.  Been there, seen that.Good sequel to The Phoenix Project, some of your favorite characters return.  But no requirement that you read that first.
This, and the pheonix project, has been one of my most captivating reads this year.Just being a software developer with 6 years of work experience I recognized so many pieces of this story from my own career. Despite most things I recognized from this book being stuff I did not enjoy experiencing, it feelt good reading a story like this and recognizing both the good and the bad.I'm very inspired by this book.I'd recommend it to anyone working with software somehow and others as well.
Awesome read for anyone on the DevOps transformational journey. Great inspiration and fun read. Highly recommended. Love how fiction and facts are mixed.
The book is interesting but I do not recommend the audio version, it is kind of a mixture of robot talk and usual audiobook. Very annoying.
Great read for anyone in tech or leadership. There are many lessons in this book where either engineer staff or leadership can learn a lot. This can help win the market.
Learning in a sea of new technology is challenging.  The Unicorn Project is a great read and provides a vision of transformation really looks like.  Read and plot a new action on how to make thing easier, less complex and rewarding.  Elegant Simplicity, so needed.
This is written in the form of a novel making it a very easy read.  If you're in the Agile and/or Devops field, this is an essential book for your personal library.
A good story about DevOps focused on the development side. It's the happy path version and unreasonably fast, but reality would make a good story.
The novel format is hard to stop reading! This inspires me to keep learning. It is a book I will recommend to many people.
It is a good book but didn't tell the story that I think companies are really struggling with currently. Not as relatable to corporations that have moved to the cloud and have restructured their architecture already moved away from monolithic applications.
As a software developer of two decades, I have seen many of the failures and successes that the book explores. There are many gems, and I will be thinking about this book for a long time. I have already started initiatives at my company to improve integration between teams before even finishing reading.
Where The Phoenix Project addresses top-down change driven by leadership, The Unicorn Project illustrates the power of bottom-up initiatives driven by those closest to the work. Technical readers will see themselves in the team and learn ways of working with the business to make change. Non-technical readers will see why "simple" changes can be much more complex than they'd think. The book promotes a healthy understanding between all aspects of the software lifecycle, from ideation through creation, delivery, and maintenance.
This book clearly explains the principles of success and the process of achieving it. Gene Kim has another hit on his hands. Buy it, read it, and apply it to your work life.
Struggling with the why of digital transformation? Are you a UX professional working in enterprise IT? Are you abstracted away from your end user? Has your business matured enough to operationalize human insight gathering? My hypothesis is not yet.  The Unicorn Project and the Phoenix Project are MANDATORY reading for any UX professional entering the domain of cloud infrastructure and IT.  It's so on point you could use the characters as a set of persona hypotheses to evaluate against your customer and user base.
I say this is another chapter of the Phoenix project since it fills out the development side of that same story. It presents a compelling narrative of how a company may progress towards this business and culture model. It provides working examples of the teaching regarding how to achieve the transformation with references in an engaging story that has helped me have a deeper understanding of the DevOps culture.
Much more connected to marketing and data science outcomes. Great anecdote for any large company struggling with innovation. Updated references to reflect the new era of technology. Not just for technologists but valuable for marketers, product managers and executives.
I will say do not trust this book for estimating effort for work. But it is great as a story of terrible practices and moving into good ones. They show examples, failures, and trials that are very interesting. There is even a pinch of drama that makes for a strong closing of the book.
I really enjoyed The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim. It's a fantastic follow-up and worthy peer to The Phoenix Project, more focused on the developer persona.In the book, Kim discusses Five Ideals, and one really resonated with me - "The improvement of daily work." The claims is this is more important than daily work itself. This includes re-architecting when necessary, and persistently paying down technical debt. Pseudo-quote that stuck with me: "Technical debt isn't good or bad; it just is."
Amazing and insightful playbook for any company undergoing a digital transformation. I work for a big financial company and I find it so relevant for us. I even get inspired by founding the Rebellion Group of talented people across the company. My best book so far - analogies for incumbents are applicable. My strong recommendations for everyone on the path of digital transformation and well beyond adopting 5 ideals and moving from Context to Core.
Gene is back with another winner! Unicorn Project uses the same storytelling style of the Phoenix Project, which I find refreshing and much more engaging than your typical business/tech book. So many other books contain the principles, but fail to demonstrate them/put them into action. By doing so, Gene helps readers truly understand what their takeaways should be.One example: "Find Your Tribe." Here, it means that in order to accomplish difficult goals in a large organization, you must network/find the people that can help you. On the surface, everyone knows that networking is important. Most books stop there. Maxine, the main character, though, _shows us HOW_ she finds a tribe of people across IT and management that help her untangle some nasty legacy tech and bureaucratic issues. That's what brings this book to another level.I'll be recommending this and Phoenix Project to everyone I know - from software devs to management.My only wish (second edition?) would be an appendix chapter where the author summarizes the Unicorn Project lessons from his perspective. I'm sure this book was inspired partly by his real-life experiences, so I'd be curious to read about those in the context of this book. I will say though, by not having this, it's forcing _me_ to think about deeply on the book's lessons and how I can apply them to my daily work. This was likely intentional.  :)
Reading The Unicorn Project was like a real-life adventure into the world of complex IT systems and into the all so common, but hard to solve problems that are encountered in these environments. I had to remind myself that this is fiction in the end, as most of the situations that the teams went through resonated with my history in software development.The Five Ideals that carry the book through are sound and very practical and I found The Unicorn Project to be a worthy successor to The Phoenix Project. I found myself reflecting my own approaches in my daily work to the ideals, which is always a good sign that there is actual value behind them.Some of the technology and functional programming highlights were a bit too much, as they distracted my reading from the story and broke flow in my reading. I just glossed those over further in the book.
I liked this significantly less than the 5*, highly, highly recommended Phoenix Project. I do not work in IT, but I am from the continuous improvement / Lean world in the office, and I'm always looking for other perspectives.Pros:- Good story. I did find Maxine's story engaging and relatable. We've all been in a bureaucratic nightmare, and it's almost always of our own creation.- The 5 points / maxims are great discussion points with organizations. I don't see them as limited to only developers; anyone who works in an office environment can read and get those, and we all feel the pain when we don't flow.Cons:- The biggest miss was burying the content too deeply in the story. The 5 points / maxims were referred to quite a few times, but not in a complete and structured way. I would have loved to see something at the end of chapters to call them out and reinforce where they were used in that chapter. Further - there were a couple other interesting topics buried in the book - Horizon 1, 2, and 3 - that were discussed but never fully explained other than a description. I was very interested in this and definitely wanted to know more.- At times it was very deep in the weeds about specific technical issues. For the narrative, it worked, but it seemed to hide the overall concept.- Erik referring to everyone as Sensei XXX was annoying to me. Minor thing but ugh.
To start off with a similar statement as the book, you donâ€™t need to read The Phoenix Project to read the book. On the contrary, youâ€™ll only need to read The Phoenix Project.Taking another metaphor to explain what is the problem. The whole story is written in a way that is similar to the Star Trek Enterprise service shaft engineers trying to figure out why the tea created by the replicators is 45.5 degree instead of 45 degree, while the ship is about to blow up and Bridge is busy trying to solve that problem. Hell, we even donâ€™t know about the fact that the company is threaten being out from business.Our engineers in the service shaft knows every technology, every answer to any question, so they donâ€™t need to go through struggles to figure out answers or for the matter of fact learn anything new. They already know it. All of them.The only storyline in the book is always rosy.  Sometimes itâ€™s a bit dark colored, sometimes more of a vivid pink, but it is always pink.Luckily, The Phoenix Project book was published first, reading this I would have never considered reading The Phoenix Project.
Gene Kim's relatable writing style keeps the pages turning quite easily. I read The Phoenix Project and at the time I was in IT, and that novel helped inspire my movement and career development to become a developer with the inspiration of devOps. The Unicorn Dev project once again put me back into a real-world scenario of an organization and team that I could relate with and felt like I was part of the team too! There were even parts in the novel where I found myself gripped emotionally. Mostly, I am in awe that the main character is able to accomplish so much as a key member of the teams and the company. Here's hoping that the inspiration and motivation from this novel will propel not only my career, but, since I am also looking at buying several copies to give to key colleagues in the office, I am interested in seeing what impacts this gem will inspire in others!
If you have not read "The Phoenix Project" book, read that instead or read it first. I understand the author's intent to refresh the story and make it more modern with the use of the most recent technologies and tech terms. However, it seems to be more attempt to monetize once more based on the initial success of the "The Phoenix Project" book. There is no purpose of the "The Unicorn Project" as it reinforces the same points made in "The Phoenix Project." BTW, "The Phoenix Project" is a more realistic and better story. Don't take me wrong, I did enjoy reading the "The Unicorn Project," but I guess my expectations were set high after the first book. I liked how, in the first book, the main character had to manage and balance between his family and his office work and make tough choices. And it is missing from "The Unicorn Project."
This work is a sequel to Kimâ€™s other novel The Phoenix Project. Although the books fit together, they need not be read together. In other words, both books are self-standing. This work â€“ essentially about dealing with the software industry in an age of constant change â€“ does an even better job than The Phoenix Project at highlighting how businesses can adapt to and thrive in the digital era.The book is set in an auto-parts company. Parts Unlimited has been a mainstay of industry since World War I, but they are consistently out of step with rising technology and the generation that uses it. The protagonist Maxine and her band of good people (called â€œthe Rebellionâ€) seek to change Parts Unlimited back to being a pace-setting in its industry. In so doing, Kim provides them as an example of how an industrial-age company can adapt itself to the era of digital technology.As in any good book, there is drama, and there are evildoers. Like in all good stories, some of the evildoers become redeemed. Being divided into three parts, this book seemed to lag in the third part. The third part mainly tells the story of Maxine and the Rebellionâ€™s successes in the auto-parts industry. Frankly, I donâ€™t much care for the auto-parts industry; I care for the characters in the book more. This section lacked drama amongst the characters and thus did not grip my attention as much as the other two sections.Still, Kim achieves his primary goal. He illustrates how to adapt digital principles (still of a DevOps ilk, but more general in this book) to modern business management. He does so in a manner that is more entertaining than most management books and that is more in line with Socratic teaching methods of storytelling and dialog. I note that this book is currently on Amazon.comâ€™s best-seller lists. I anticipate it will stay there for a long while.
Finished "the Unicorn Project"  last night, and  I have mixed feelings about it.  At first I had a real hard time getting into it - the main character, Maxine, just seemed like a complete Mary-Sue and characters from "The Phoenix Project" seemed to have completely changed personality, and not for the better.  Also the perspective of the book changed to 3rd person so it was less personal.About 1/4 to 1/3 of the way in the action picked up and the characters started to encounter issues in cloud migration, data-lakes, digital transformation, organizational silos, and management that I deal with everyday and I started sympathizing more - and my opinion of the book became FAR more positive.  By the end I was glad to see the rebellion won and Parts Unlimited was saved, but honestly at a couple points (when Erik kept referring to everyone as Sensei for example), I was kind of hoping Sarah would.Overall it was a decent enough books with some good lessons for people trying to help transform a company, and I would recommend it.  (Oh and by the end I actually liked Maxine but that was not a guaranteed outcome she was really annoying initially)
awful. this book is junk
Obviously there are similarities to "The Phoenix Project", but I personally feel that "The Phoenix Project" is the book I would pass along to senior leadership, while "The Unicorn Project" is what I would suggest to my fellow "red shirts" and "rebels" with their hands on the keyboard.I found that Gene Kim's writing style felt smoother this time around, specifically, I felt the transitions from conversation to explanation were more fluid, e.g. when there's a reference to Demming and then an explanation of the principle, keeping me more connected with the story and its characters without being reminded that I'm learning ;-)I also really appreciated the developer perspective of this story. Not only was the political landscape familiar, but there were at least 3 scenarios in the story where I have been in EXACTLY the same situation. Found myself grimacing and laughing at the same time on multiple occasions.For me, the biggest take away was this: no matter where you are in your org structure, you can affect change. If you are searching for a transformation playbook from the top down, you might want to start with "The Phoenix Project", "Accelerate", or "The DevOps Handbook", but if you want to be inspired to start making impactful change from deep within the trenches, this is the book for you.
A great follow up to the Phoenix project. Showing the 'other side' of the transformation of Parts Unlimited. Less focus on theory on this one and more fast paced examples of building out a change culture.
I liked the buildup of the story and how the concepts of modern software engineering are neatly woven in to the plot. Well done, I really enjoyed it and the actionable insights that came along with it.
If you liked The Phoenix Project read this one, too.
I would recommend this book to everyone in IT. It is so much fun to read from page 1 to the last one. Five ideals are what we applied and part of continuous improvement.
I liked the storyline writing.  It was easy to follow the concepts.  I recognize my environment.
Perfect complement to the Phoenix Project!
A terrific translation of the ideals expected from engineering organizations exemplified through the eyes of those who should own that change.
In the digitally disrupted world its important for to understand the four ideals and their primary core business and keep the context outside.
Im a devops Engineer and i know the phoniex book, many years ago... and this book is reality if what we face every day
Shows how important standards and controls are with an alge approach.
As a software engineer it is very interesting to see that all the problems we deal with are not unique and that most companies are dealing with legacy outdated systems that they are trying to update while dealing with the uphill battle that it is getting the right people to understand the benefits.
Great read for any IT or business person
Mirrored a somewhat similar situation I found myself in but took a different direction.  The book is entertaining and one that provides a great outline on how to approach certain situations.
Well written story.  Effective. Glad I read it!
It just reminds me of my job. So many ways things could improve there.  Reading this made me want to laugh and cry with how much I could relate to it.
This was a great book. Like it's predecessor I couldn't put it down.
Book was in great shape. I had pre-ordered it and was pleasantly surprised upon its arrival
Enjoyable reading. Recommend to all.
Another great book of insights by Gene Kim. Stop reading reviews and just buy the book already!
Unicorns uwu
If you read â€œThe Phoenix Projectâ€ and liked it you have to buy this book!!!I think if you are an IT guy you will feel as many of the main characters from the book
The back story of the Unicorn project was great!  Unfortunately they made Erik into a cartoon and the narratorâ€™s refusal to pronounce â€œtâ€s (buh-in, impor-en) was distracting.  Still a great read!
I enjoyed reading this book to learn techniques and ideas on the DevOps philosophy.  The characters seemed real and believable. A fun read!
Very helpful to put all the separate ideas within a context and gain some idea on how to apply this in your own work.
Having read â€œThe Goalâ€, â€œThe Phoenix Projectâ€, and others, I anxiously dove into â€œThe Unicorn Project. I found many nuggets of knowledge and so many examples of organizational miss-behaviors.Looking past some of the language choices and seemingly 4th grade grammar, it is a fascinating read.
Really enjoyed this books. Sort of wished that the Pheonix/Unicorn timeline was integrated visually as the chapters progressed. It was still great to see it at the end. I read portions over and over because it was so compelling and relevant to opportunities I'm currently working. Thirsty for more.
This is a more engineer focused Phoenix Project. It is an easy read and is eye opening to me (and Iâ€™m sure many others) who are engineers and are frustrated at work due to inefficient practices. It has helped me understand and communicate issues I simply couldnâ€™t put into the proper terms previously.
Nice companion to The Phoenix Project. Provides the perspective from the development side vs the management side.
Alter The Goal, The Phoenix Project,  this book is (in my opinion) one that should be on the bedside table on anyone working in technology,
This is a great primer on data ethics. It is well written, easy to read, concise, and well organized. The authors provide good use case examples of how ethical data decisions can be made. We are at the beginning of an international and trans-juristictional debate on the role of data, content, fact and fiction in our lives, societies, and democracies.  We can regulate the use of data and algorithms, but finding the right path forward will be difficult. Books like this point us in the right direction.
Adresses the topics of security and ethics at a level sufficient to stimulate thought and discussion. Book is a very quick read.  In fact, great material for teams wanting to take on data challenges in their work.  I shared it widely where I work.
This book is about the importance of the ethics in data science and how it affect custimers and businesss. This book also provides a list of thing that you can and can't with the customer data.
A brief introduction to get us thinking about important ethics concepts in data science.  The book does a great job of covering a lot of ground in a concise format.
I was interested in learning more about Ethics in Data Science and Machine Learning.  This book "got my feet wet" and pointed me toward more helpful resources.
Very short book. Wonderfuly simple framework and lots of pointers to other, more substantial books. Great starter book for newbies
Nice, short read. A bit trite. As the general description above shows, there are a lot of points other ethics studies would call trivial.
A Good Book to read.
This book is as relevant as the Phoenix Project, but now from a developer perspective. Highly recommended!
Wanted a followup to the Phoenix project. This book delivered.
There are many things wrong with this audio book, the least of which is badly pieced in audio pieces from different recordings. The worst offender, is the unrelatable Mary Sue of a main character. Unlike our hero in the Phoenix Project, who had to learn what needs to be done (like the classic "hero journey" plot), Maxine just needs opportunity and a general nudge in the right direction. Eric still pops up as a mysterious Yoda like mentor, but he also is unrelatable. He has went from odd to cartoony. Maxine is sidelined for something she didn't do (she doesn't make mistakes like our beloved Brent), has disassembled vendor DB drivers and patched them all in one night, she is known for her patience, and unlike anyone I know-- loves and is amazed by every other team in the company that interacts with her. Oh, and no work/life balance issues like Bill, and she even has a puppy to play with (of course she does). Our villain, Sarah, even invites her out to lunch after Maxine snubs her, b/c of them being the same gender (the Sr. VP literally says, "Us girls have to stick together" in a meeting of mixed company). I wish Maxine and her whole perfect entourage was our only problem.In addition to that, where TPP. the characters and problems were so relatable that people were writing the authors to see if they were writing about their company, here the problems are very hit and miss. Worse again, where TPP concentrated on the 3 Ways and 4 types of work, the TUP is less defined. Eric mentions 4 horizons and something else-- which I've forgotten. Something about being happy at work *shrug*. Maxine is a evangelist for functional programming and immutable data, and there are many other little things that get very lost in the book. In addition, either the author or John Willis said there's no learning without mistakes-- Maxine makes no mistakes. She needs some course correction, but never goes down the wrong path. That's another difference between her and Bill. B/c of that, the lessons aren't driven home. This makes it a 12 hour book, that would have been better as a 1.5 hour TED Talk.The book will have great reviews b/c Gene Kim helped produced TPP and is a master in DevOps; however, objectively this is a huge miss. Anyone considering this that hasn't listened to his "Beyond the Phoenix Project" should get it instead.
I bought the audible version for a business trip with long-ish flight. I still have 4 hours left.Overall, the story is good. Anyone in a software field would readily recognize the terminology and problems addressed. Those not in a software field may be left behind. The technical issues and solutions presented in story form are very good and solid principles are described throughout.I found a few items to be very annoying to the point of wanting to put the book down: - the length is much too long with a very repetitive story line. Perhaps the author should take the advice presented in the book and simplify the manuscript. - referring to existing CEOs as Sensei seems very strange to an English speaker. - the use of "daily work" to refer to tasks, jobs, or other more commonly used terms was also very annoying. It reminded me of a commercial from many years ago that used the term in a completely different context and was equally annoying - several of the concepts were lost in the storyFor Audible: this would be fantastic if you create a shortened version targeting about 1/3 of the time.
Read this right after reading the Phoenix Project. As other reviewers have said the points of the method he was trying to show got too far buried under the story itself. Maxine is shown as can do no wrong. Yet this is the woman who after describing the hodgepodge of technologies slaved together to make the systems work, then introduces another technology Clojure into the stack that no one else at the company is described as knowing, and just adds another knowledge dependency going forward for a technology that will have to be staffed going forward if that needs any modification. It was obvious that the author is enamored of clojure, but in a real business system where is the evaluation of the risk versus reward of replacing existing code that others around were able to work on with this lisp based java framework that only she talked about. (Page 485 in apple e-book has them reduce the line count of a code base from 2000 lines to 500 lines across hours, then rewrites it magically in 45 minutes to 50 lines of code)Of course this same section contains one of the numerous editing issue that pulled me out of the story. It goes "Maxine modifies the class hierarchy..." that should have been edited to "Maxine modified the class hierarchy..." it is awkward english the first way. And the story is all over the place. It goes from first person, to third person to second person, and back constantly.
The Unicorn Project lives up to its predecessor, The Phoenix Project.  Itâ€™s less a how-to guide and more a novel.  Itâ€™s equal parts cautionary tale and guide to a better future.As a senior developer, I relate well to Maxine.  She brings with her solid technical skills, but more importantly, she sees the dysfunction in the Phoenix Project software delivery culture, and sheâ€™s willing to bend a few rules to fix it. Sheâ€™s the opposite of a lone â€œ10x developerâ€; rather, she makes sure to document and teach others the best practices as she learns them.  She and the Rebellion, a small but highly motivated team, find creative ways to get out of the morass of red tape and poor morale imposed by well-meaning, but horribly misguided, management.  In my experience, a â€œpioneer teamâ€ like the Rebellion is often the only way to prove out the value of a new way of working, and then expand it to a broader audience.Experienced developers will have seen quite a few of the best and worst practices in The Unicorn Project.  Gene Kim relied not just on his own experience, but also on in-depth interviews with many software development teams over the past few years.  Heâ€™s done the legwork and found the common patterns: what works well for many of us, and what sounds good in theory but fails in practice.I recommend this book for new developers, so they can understand why certain practices like automated testing are so important, and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.The primary audience for this book would be technical leads as well as development managers.  These are the people best positioned to push for the software development best practices demonstrated in The Unicorn Project.Finally, I recommend the book for executives, so they understand what their technical teams mean by things like â€œpaying down technical debtâ€ and â€œa blameless cultureâ€, and why itâ€™s so important to encourage such best practices, even at the cost of fast feature delivery.
I do believe Gene Kim has another landmark book on his hands with The Unicorn Project. Iâ€™ve just finished reading it and immediately bought 20 copies for technology leaders in my company.The Unicorn Project is set in the same fictional company as The Phoenix Project. The earlier book was focused on why the companyâ€™s traditional leadership approach and processes were killing it and needed to become more lean-agile. I found it a perfect gift for non-technical leaders and stakeholders who I wanted to recruit as supporters of agile transformation but who might get bogged down in too much detail about all our various overlapping â€œagileâ€ methodologies.This new book is much more focused on the technology side of things, both the truly technical and how technical teams can better work together. I think many technologists and technology leaders will painfully relate to how messed up Parts Unlimitedâ€™s tech landscape is and how frustratingly little value can be delivered despite hard work by lots of people. And they will appreciate being shown a vision of what a healthy tech landscape can look like. Every companyâ€™s details will vary of course, more so than with the leadership/process topics of the Phoenix Project. But I think any frustrated technologist, bogged down by tech debt and stupidly arbitrary organizational silos, will be inspired by the healthier Parts Unlimited that emerges at the end of the book and want to change their own companies for the better.While some of us who have been in the Agile movement for a long time may feel like everyone must be doing this stuff already, itâ€™s just not true. There are a lot of companies and people who have barely started their journeys. And, as Agile has gone mainstream thereâ€™s an increasing risk of Agile-in-name-only. The Unicorn Project provides an easily understandable picture of the real problem weâ€™re trying to solve that should help keep people focused on their intended outcomes rather than the particular details of their chosen flavor of agility.I highly recommend the book. Get a copy. Give a copy.
They say that creating working software is one of the most social activities in which humans can be involved.  I agree, and this book will give valuable insights to the reader that uses format in which The Unicorn Project was written to glean and retain with vivid detail many frequently occurring patterns of behavior that manifest among people in knowledge work, in general.  This addresses an audience much wider than someone in a start-up or venture capital funded, pre-IPO organization.  Anyone in knowledge work, but especially those who lead them, will derive extensive value by studying the pages of this book.  Gene Kim writes from first-hand experience, and is more knowledgeable than anyone I've seen presenting, writing, or practicing in this field.  The insights he offers are priceless.
Coming from a deep operations background, I could really relate to The Phoenix Project.  This was MY life!  But many could not relate in the same way.  In The Unicorn Project, we come back to the same situations, written from the "other side".  But it's not just about developers and the struggles they go through to get code from their desks into production.  One of the best parts of The Unicorn Project is also bringing in more of the business perspective, the dueling personalities at the top of the ladder.  We've all worked at companies where someone who is awesome is let go and everyone is left scratching their heads.  The UP gives people who may not have experience at that level a better understanding of how the whole organization functions and how it takes the entire organizations supporting each other and working together to achieve common business outcomes, in other words, DevOps!  So, tune in for The Resistance, the extreme decision to run Tomcat in production, and stay for the ascension of Maxine, the demise of...EOT.
Kim's previous Phoenix Project is a great bookâ€”a must-read, in fact. This book is a pale shadow of that. I found the trials and tribulations of Maxine to be overdone. Her comic-book evil-company world is vastly worse than even the worst IT departments I've encountered, and the actual good advice in the book (the 5 ideals) is buried so deep as to be lost in the shuffle. Those ideals are nothing new. He's taken simplicity and customer focus from Lean thinking and the Agile Manifesto, Improvement is also central to both Lean thinking (Kaizen) and Agile (retrospectives), Psychological Safety is better learned from Amy Edmondson's "The Fearless Oganization" (she invented the concept), and Focus/Flow/Joy is really a recasting of "Drive's" Autonomy/Mastery/Purpose. If all of that is new to you, go ahead and get the book. If it's all old hat, then save your money and buy something with more substance to it.
This is the best data science + intro to Programming (R) book Iâ€™ve read thus far. I can recommend this to people when teaching different data focused gatherings. They really put their best forward in simplifying and explaining so many details, even though there is so much more to learn (thatâ€™s the fun part!). I look forward to future books and would be bummed if I didnâ€™t get to own and read 50+ different future writings of michael freeman and Joel Ross.
While Freeman and Ross's Programming Skills for Data Science is a standout compilation of a variety of introductory data science topics, the value of the text is diminished by the authors' inability to fully articulate many of the nuances of data science.What is really great:1. An excellent spread of important topics that are often omitted from a data science text, but are skills that every data scientist should know, including git (for collaboration), markdown and bash.2. Elegant coding and plots.  Being an effective communicator cannot be understated and the care the authors take in providing beautiful code demonstrates their pedagogic expertise.3. A nice set of complementary exercises and code available on GitHub to practice your data science skill set.What isn't so great:1. Part of the challenge of data science is it encompasses so many topics and while the authors do try to include many references, when I finished the book, I felt that a number of noteworthy topics were not given any treatment whatsoever.  There was no mention of object oriented programming or computational complexity.  The data wrangling section seems a bit short and does not really get into how ugly a data set can be and what functions you need to clean it (e.g. drop duplicate records).  And perhaps worst of all, the authors bemoan the challenge of resolving package conflicts, but do not mention any potential solutions to help address these difficulties (like Docker).2. The examples at time tend to be very dry or misaligned with a data science textbook.  Seeing multiple toy references to data sets about people's height is painful.  Part of an introductory data science text is to inspire the reader regarding the versatility of the field and the lack of attention given to providing interesting data sets causes the text to lose some of its persuasive message.  (The constant focus on geospatial visualization is a bit too much at times as such plotting techniques are probably better for a more specialized text on geospatial data science.).3. Finally, the prose in Designing Visualizations and Understanding Data is a bit too dry or contradictory at times.  The Understanding Data section would be much better motivated by relating stories where not understanding the story behind the data led to disastrous consequences as opposed to just reiterating trite talking points (e.g. know your data).  Similarly, while most of the visualizations are absolutely stunning and the code to write them is very short and readable, they are sometimes cluttered with large or awkward font- a point the authors admit should be avoided when possible.Overall, I would certainly recommend this text to a colleague and I look forward to seeing future revisions of the text that hopefully will address some of the shortcomings listed above.
This is an incredibly well-written book. The language is accessible and straightforward. Concepts are easy to grasp.The authors provide step by step explanation about how to download the necessary programs and operate them.I highly recommend this book. You won't regret.
I recently got this book as a supplement to my learning R in a university system since my professor was not the best teacher. I must say I'm glad I found this book. Unlike many other coding books, it starts at the very beginning such as file management, text editors, the best IDEs, and project set up. After these topics it jumps into the typical computer science stuff like variables, data types, etc. It's hard to stress how nice it is for a book to be comprehensive in its approach to learning a computer programming language. Too many books forget that its a contextual process, and it's crucial to understand everything that goes along with simply just coding scripts and functions.The book goes over how to collect and manipulate data, how to visualize data, and how to build and share your applications. It goes over so many important concepts that I've found other books lack like accessing data from databases and web APIs, and it introduces many of the essential functions used for data analysis too. As someone who was personally interested in making maps with R, there are great examples of that too.The writing is clear and concise, the examples are fantastic, and the snippets of code are extremely helpful. You can tell it was written by someone who is good at and excited by data science. If you're looking for an enjoyable, comprehensive, and practical overview of R definitely get this book.
The proverb â€œGive a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime,â€ is known by almost everyone. In Malware Data Science: Attack Detection and Attribution, authors Joshua Saxe and Hillary Sanders artfully show the reader how not only to avoid being a victim of malicious code, but how to actively defend against it, and even build your own systems to do that.Malware is such a huge issue, that many anti-virus vendors update their signatures hourly to deal with the never-ending set of threats. The authors work at Sophos (Chief Data Scientist and Infrastructure Data Science Team Lead, respectively) and have written a highly technical and effective guide that readers can use to implement their own defensive systems.At the start, the authors define data science as, â€œA growing set of algorithmic tools that allow users to understand and make predictions about data using statistics, mathematics, and artful statistical data visualizations.â€ The book focuses on data science as it applies to malware, which they define as, â€œexecutable programs written with malicious intent.â€The book is meant as an introduction to the use of data science to malware analysis and detection. The authors take a broad approach to the topic and discuss static malware analysis, x86 disassembly, dynamic analysis and identifying attack campaigns using malware networks. Later chapters detail how the reader can build machine learning detectors, neural network malware detector, and more.The book is insightful for all information security professionals in general, but more specifically those who code and can read code, specifically in Python. The authors provide many code and data samples and have included all of them on the bookâ€™s web site. There the reader can also find instructions for downloading and running a VirtualBox Ubuntu virtual machine which contains the book's code, data, and all of the requisite dependencies.The book closes with a chapter on becoming a data scientist, where the authors discuss the paths to becoming a security data scientist and a day in the life of a security data scientist. More importantly, they detail the traits of an effective security data scientist. For those looking to become a security data scientist, or just want to get a comprehensive understanding of how to use data science to deal with malicious software, Malware Data Science: Attack Detection and Attribution is a superb reference to help you get there.
**I am not a verified purchaser, as I received this books as a Christmas gift in 2019.I cannot recommend this book for several reasons. First, this book has some unfortunate timing in that all the code examples use Python2. At publish time this book was just two years away from Python2 end of life. Although most book on technology rapidly become out of date, it feels as if the authors really shot themselves in the foot here. I saw little reason that the authors could not have updated their work for Python3.Second, the code and data that accompany the book is incomplete and many files are missing altogether. You can download the data from the book website or you can download a Linux virtual machine built specifically for the book which includes the data and code. In both cases, there are python scripts and data files that the book clearly references as found within the data that are simply not there. I can provide numerous concrete examples that I won't for brevity's sake.All this being said, it is still possible to work through a lot of the examples with a bit of extra work and know-how. But I found that the trouble simply wasn't worth it for me, and I am certainly no stranger to Linux. Being that this book is aimed at relative beginners, I'd imagine them struggling to get set up started with the material.In the end the book is a decent and simple introduction to malware analysis and data science. One could certainly read the book, skipping the code examples, and learn a few things. However this book is far from a complete package.
As a data scientist and machine learning practitioner I was disappointed in this book.  Admittedly the authors faced the very difficult task of trying to communicate the relationship of two very deep and technical subjects: malware analysis and machine learning.  The result, unfortunately, is a work that is only the barest introduction to both.The first half of the book dips a toe in the ocean of malware static analysis, dynamic analysis, and reverse engineering.  Not knowing anything about malware, this section of the book did indeed spark my curiosity and supply me with strong motivation to continue my studies in malware analysis with other, more comprehensive resources.The second half of the book is a shallow overview of basic, elementary topics in machine learning and common tools used by practitioners.  This overview is accompanied by proof-of-concept applications to malware detection.  The machine learning overview will not supply any new knowledge to anyone who has any practical experience in machine learning and for a complete beginner it is insufficient even as a first course.In summary, this is not a bad book as the authors are clearly technically proficient, good writers, and passionate about their area of expertise.  Nonetheless, be aware that if you are not already an expert in malware AND machine learning you will need to follow up this short read with much more detailed sources.  If you are already proficient in both subjects than you will already understand how to apply machine learning to malware analysis to the level of basic examples found in this book.
I loved this book, it gives you a quick intro to disassemble and "reverse engineering", and it states that if you want to go deeper you can read Practical Malware analysis, which I think could be the next level of this book, from there it's just a roller coaster of binary data analysis, data visualization and coding. Joshua and Hillary made a good job at keeping the code readable, while teaching some key concepts on ML and deep learning, data visualization and analysis. In the end, the book not only feeds you with plenty of information, but also is able to give you new ideas.
This book is a straightforward and useful guide to malware analysis, including machine learning and deep learning methods of IDS.  The website includes a downloadable VM for execution in VirtualBox on a student's laptop.  It's a little light in some areas, but would be great in combination with another book that went into more details about reverse engineering, disassembly, static and dynamic analysis, etc.
The book arrived in perfect condition, not a single blemish anywhere. As a collector of books from No Starch Press, I value this text and the material discussed within is invaluable. I recommend this book for all data scientists, infosec noobs and vets, hackers of all skill levels, ANYONE with an interest in cybersecurity or hacking.
Wow, this is one amazing introduction.  Iâ€™m usually reading other bug hunting books, then I came upon this book. I kind of shined away from machine learning, however this book provided me with surprises, pleasent ones.  A very 8nteresting book.
Malware Data Science book is one of the best book in the industry to start with, to figure out this complex field more deeply. I recommend all professionals to read it, and try to make use of its practical applications in ML/DL/AI.
The intersection of data science and infosec is smaller than should be. The authors have done a great job explaining complex topics clearly, and with good code.
Nothing to dislike and exactly the information I needed, although it's taking a good bit of time to read and absorb. ;)
Good book. I just wish it was more technical