A reasonable number of
individuals that I have worked with over the years have been kind enough to buy
a copy of the book. A favourite pastime seems to be "spot the project or
bid that I worked on". When they have said to me with great certainty
"This is project x", it is interesting to note that more have been
wrong in their assertion than have been right. In my experience, arguably
reinforced by the readers' claims, many of the issues that are highlighted by
the war stories are universal; indeed, they are repeated over and over by
different projects and bids. I did wonder how the war stories would be
received. So far, with one notable exception, readers generally seem to
understand that the war stories are an important and integral part of the book.
This is a cry that I have
heard a number of times with respect to various technology tasters in part 2 of
the book. It is inevitable that many readers will have a particular technology
that they are currently working on, one that they may be unfamiliar with, that
they wish to know much more about. Alternatively, it may be that I have simply
whetted the appetite; one of my reviewers wanted to know much more about
firewalls. Unfortunately, as I try to make clear in the book, the term
"tasters" was chosen quite deliberately; the objective was simply to
provide a useful introduction to a technology and to outline the main performance-related
issues, typically within 2-3K words. If I had attempted to go into enormous
detail on each technology it would have been an infinitely larger book that
would quickly date, and I would probably still be writing it!