Book review: Project Phoenix
- Authors
Hi! Here I wanted to tell you about my feelings after reading the Project Phoenix book. Of course I’m not a professional book critic, I would like to show my point of view on the book from the programmer's perspective.
Tech book or a novel?
The whole story is of course interesting and based on a tech corporation who needs to launch a new enormous project which will change the future of the corp. There are a lot of situations that I came across in my career - mostly related to working with other people (business/managers especially) so I could feel it very clearly. All of that is interspersed with basic topics of a programmer's work like using kanban board, scrum/agile workflow and mostly just organizing corporation work.
Later and later there it is more novel than technical stuff. And the novel at the end… is nearly as realistic as the “American Dream”.
For who is this book?
I think that Project Phoenix can be lucrative mostly for an enter level occupations like programmer, project manager, scrum master etc. We can learn from the book how should look like the healthy work flow in corporation, but any other person who have more than a year or two years of experience will be bored and not learn so much.
What we can learn?
Overall in this book, even for entry level people there is not much to learn. The most important things are about: Using SCRUM to handle development circles (planning -> development -> retro etc.) Using kanban as a source for keeping all things to do and planning when to do them with correlation with other teams Integration - people must talk to people. One team which is working on the same product should inform the other team who is also working on the same product. To plan releases with other teams to not break other people's work. About managing and planning business plans with managers & tech people etc.
Would I recommend this book?
Definitely! If you started your learning journey as a programmer, project manager etc and you don’t have any commercial experience or less than a year. It will be lucrative and not each tech related book must be difficult and packed with knowledge.
But if you already have at least one year of commercial experience, there is nothing more for you than a novel.