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If I sit through one more conference panel and listen to a former Web executive drone on and on about the months of 18-hour days leading up to the launch of her inevitably doomed Web property, I might boycott trade shows altogether.

Even today, the song remains the same: Staffers pull all-nighters to meet an arbitrary deadline and expect to be treated as martyrs in the pursuit of a noble cause. Ultimately, they tear their hair out when they miss the deadline and end up with a shoddy product anyway. What follows is an en masse departure of team members, voluntary or otherwise.

Dan Carrison's Deadline! How Premier Organizations Win the Race Against Time (Amacom) is fascinating stuff, full of practical yet visionary information on how to meet time commitments and still maintain your sanity. This isn't just fluffy garbage like "develop good time management skills." Carrison offers very specific advice, all drawn from case studies that he has intricately researched.

The book is packed with good advice such as how to get a jump start on a project before you have official approval, the importance of putting team members in close proximity so they can exert deadline pressure on one another, partnering with historical adversaries, and involving others in the deadline-setting process. And that's just in the first chapter, a case study about a $400 million NFL stadium that was completed on time and under budget.

Both thorough and easily digestible, Deadline! features checklists at the end of each chapter, providing convenient takeaways for the lessons just learned. The writing is also fascinating, with a chapter on how the FBI managed a recent kidnapping and saved the target's life.

Although Internet-specific projects go unmentioned in the book, the lessons of Deadline! are applicable to any modern-day venture, online or off. Highly recommended.

—Christopher Null

Buy this book from Amazon.com.

Web Services Explained

As a title, Web Services Explained (Prentice Hall), tells it like it is. Within the book's pages, author Joe Clabby succeeds in clarifying the tedious technical arcana surrounding the architecture of service-oriented distributed computing. He manages to frame this in a context that's meaningful, even inspirational, to IT developers and tech-savvy business strategists. That's no mean feat given that the author himself warns, "This is not one of those entertaining quick-read business books," and that it's a challenging read for which you have to "get psyched."

But it's the book's subtitle, Solutions and Applications for the Real World, that poses a problem. The solutions and applications that Clabby serves up as proof-of-concept are garnished with so many caveats that it's hard to swallow the Web services hype. Virtually every example of Web services in action is followed by a paragraph warning "Not So Fast…" that plumbs the distance between theory and reality. A better subtitle would be Solutions and Applications for a Perfect World.

That Clabby is aware of this disconnect between the promise of Web services—when data will flow freely, comprehensibly, and profitably across corporations and applications—and the Balkanized, downsized reality of business today, makes the book all the more frustrating. (Forget whether J2EE gets along with .Net; are your lawyers talking?) Clabby's guarded optimism about the technology echoes the appealing conceit of Field of Dreams: If you build it, they will come. But given the cooperative requisites of Web services, it would be more accurate to say if we all build it, they will come—now you take the risk and go first.

To be sure, Clabby deserves a medal for his efforts—he clearly knows his SOAP from his Java and technically inclined readers concerned with Web services will find his research rewarding. Whether he gets a Medal of Freedom for prescient scholarship or a Purple Heart for shooting himself in his own arguments won't be apparent until the Web services bet has paid off—or been laid to rest.

—Thomas Claburn

Buy this book from Amazon.com.

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