Kent Beck talking about "ease at work"

Here is a chance to view Kent Beck in a video. It's a talk he gave at a special event in San Francisco on May 26, 2006.

Kent Beck, the inventor of Extreme Programming, is talking about the "ease at work". I think he means the "Flow" state, a kind of positive stress where you just work on the thing you want without arguing about the world around you. There is a good book about the Flow state (Amazon) that describes the whole thing from a philosophical view.

The video is about an hour long. Watch it here.

Beyond Java

A friend of mine (Norbert) has recommended to me to read the book "Beyond Java" (Amazon).

The book is about why Java - better: J2EE is not a good web-development platform anymore. And why Ruby On Rails is so much better. Now I must say the author (Bruce Tate) makes some good points about how bad using J2EE with Spring, JSF and whatsoever has become. But as one of the Amazon reviewers calls it the book is "narrowly-focussed". The is really just about web-development and nothing else. And for that, RoR is the authors uber-solution. I'm not so sure...

But... I will give RoR a try and so I already got my next book to concentrate on: "Ruby On Rails: Up and Running" (Amazon), also from Bruce Tate.