Book Review: There's always a duck
"There's always a duck" is a LeanPub book written by Elisabeth Hendrickson (a friend of mine). You can find the book here. Since it is a LeanPub book, I can't review it on Amazon.com therefore I'll just post it on my blog. Is this the gradual end of Amazon.com who gets taken over by internet-age publishing companies? Who knows.
Anyways, There's Always a Duck is a collection of articles and blog posts that Elisabeth has posted over the last, well, 15 years or so. The book is names after the first article with the same name. The book consists of eight named parts with each about 5 articles under it. It is around 170 pages with huge fonts.
It is hard to summarize the book as it really are independent articles which are sometimes 'accidentally' linked together. The articles are Elisabeths observations of her experiences and the lessons she has drawn from it. This could be her daughter telling her that she always sees ducks with which Elisabeth concludes that if you look carefully, you'll see familiar things around. Or the description of "normal coffee" in India with which she concludes that even 'simple' terms such as 'normal' depend a lot of who is saying them and in what context.
Most of her later articles tend to be related to Agile development, whereas her earlier articles tend to be more testing focused. Yet all of the articles have some useful lesson in it. Articles are short and easy to read which makes the book a perfect reading book for short moments in which you have nothing better to do like sitting in the train or waiting in a queue :)
Though I'm probably biased, I did enjoy the book quite a lot. It isn't a wow book that I would recommend to everyone, but it is an enjoyable book full with useful anecdotes which make you laugh and are useful. From that perspective, I would recommend it as a book that you can every now and then pick up and read an article. I'd rate the book probably 4 out of 5 stars, better than "ok" yet not a book that I'll be recommending to everyone.
I do recommend getting this book simply because if it self-published and authors like Elisabeth ought to get more support via their self-published work :)
