Business Analyst Reading List

This page is a work in progress.  I am beginning to compile a rather definitive Business Analyst reading list and will be updating this page with books and short descriptions and reviews.

The Business Analysis Essential Library from Management Concepts is a complete series on Business Analysis and the Business Analyst as a career which should not be missed:

My experience with textbooks is rather minimal but I have used three editions of the Whitten/Bentley text (5th, 6th and 7th) and have been very happy with it.  I have used a few other texts throughout my undergrad and graduate studies in systems analysis and feel that Whitten/Bentley is by far the best that I have used directly.

July 7, 2008: Houseplants Doing Well

When we got home last night the first order of business was to take care of the plants.  They hate when we leave for the weekend as they don’t get their regular water and the apartment gets much warmer than usual.  It becomes a perfect breeding ground for plant pests and it takes it toll on the plants.

New Growth Section of Cycas Plant

This time we did pretty well and no plants died.  The one plant, our really resilient one – the Cycas, actually did amazingly well.  Just last week we suddenly noticed that there was some surprise new vegetation happening with it and it grew around four inches while we were gone this weekend!  The mandarin also seems to be doing pretty well with some new leaves coming in now.

After all of the driving I was not very tired – or at least not ready to go to bed.  So I ended up staying awake until after one thirty listening to ITConversations on my iPod Nano.  Then, when I did finally fall asleep, I ended up waking up around two thirty!  It seemed like I had been asleep for a long time but I had not.

Then, at three thirty in the morning, I was paged out accidentally.  Then I had a horrible time getting back to sleep.  So I was up until around four thirty, I think.  Then, of course, I am working the early morning coverage shift this week for someone so I had to be up and logged in and working by six thirty!  So basically I got no sleep at all.

We decided to have Oreo stay at home today as he is just completely exhausted.  This weekend involved a lot of travel, playing outside and grass allergies and he is just worn out.  He really needed a day to just sleep and do nothing.

My day was relatively busy.  Any time that I work the early shift this happens.  I like the early shift because it forces me to get up and to get to work right away instead of just putzing around but it also causes really long days to occur because people at the office don’t have a big board showing that I am on the early shift on a given day so people just expect me to work as late as I usually do even though I’ve been on since six thirty in the morning.

Our Mandarin Plant

In addition to working today I really had to do some house chores as Ramona and Winni are coming over this evening to play test Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition. We will see how much of a game we actually manage to play, but to speed things along Ramona is picking up Food for Life on her way to the apartment.

I did the dishes and got the kitchen cleaned up as well as cleaning around my office area and, of course, I was on plant duty today as the plants always need extra attention after being left alone for three days.

I also completed the Hewlett-Packard Linux 401 class that I have been taking.  It was shorter than the 101, 201 and 301 classes that I have taken in the past.  It may seem strange that I would take a Linux class when I am a senior Linux Sys Admin now and have been for some time but I like to make sure that people are not learning things that I am not familiar with and also I like to see what topics are a priority to students and to companies like HP.  Plus, as this class is free and online on my own schedule, it falls into the category of “how can I justify not taking it?”

I placed a large Amazon order today.  I am doing a bunch of Business Analyst work for a certification process and I need a ton of the top source material in the BA realm so I am ordering a good chunk of the definitive reading list all at once.  Several of the books were books that I had previously wanted to buy anyway so it isn’t all “expense” in the traditional sense but it is several books.  I also got a book on foreign currency trading so that I can learn more about what I support at the office.

Oreo is Glad to Be Back Home

Books ordered today: Writing Effective Use Cases by Alistair Cockburn, Software Requirements 2nd Ed., UML for the IT Business Analyst: A Practical Guide to Object-Oriented Requirements Gathering and More Joel on Software: Further Thoughts on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and … Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity by Joel Spolsky.

Dominica did some grocery shopping today on her lunch break.  She got home around six.  Winni arrived around six thirty and Ramona made it around seven.  We didn’t actually end up with any time to play any D&D.  The evenings are just so short.

We ordered in pizza from Eli’s.  That ended up taking over an hour.  So it was closing in on nine o’clock by the time that we had finished dinner and then it was not that far from bed time.  It is amazing how difficult it is to do anything on a “work night”.

Winni and Ramona left around ten thirty and Dominica and Oreo headed off to bed.  I did a little wrap up work to make sure that things were hunky-dorie at the office before going to bed myself.  There is always something that needs to be dealt with.

July 6, 2008: Last Day Camping in the Yard

Last night’s camping went even better than the night before.  This time we figured out that we needed a little more separation between the air matress and us so we added an extra sheet and that was enough to keep us from getting too humid and sticking to the inflatable bed.  Oreo has decided that this is his new home and he is very happy.  His grass allergy is hitting him pretty hard, though.  This is going to be a long couple weeks for our tired Boston Terrier.

Oreo Skulking Away from the Tent

Our big project today was, of course, to strike the camp site.  This is our first time taking down the tent so we were a bit nervous.  The take down process went pretty smoothly and we were impressed by how easy it all was.  We are scared to do this again at all, which is good as we will be doing it again next weekend.

While we were striking the camp site and packing the car, Oreo took the opportunity to sneak off on his own to the far reaches of the yard and to roll in something stinky.  So he got a bath this afternoon as well.

We ended up getting stuck at dad’s house much later than we had intended because of some emergencies from work.  We had gone out to breakfast around eleven but then there was an emergency and we had to rush back so that I could work for several hours.  We made good use of the time and I managed to do demonstration builds of OpenSUSE 11.0 on an AthlonXP 2800+ based HP D325 and a Pentium III 1GHz based Compaq DeskPro for Castile Christian Academy.  The new desktop build (running KDE4 as we haven’t seen any issues yet) is looking very promising for CCA.

It was so late by the time that we were ready to leave dad’s house that we decided to all go over to the Omega Grill for dinner – our second time today and third time for the weekend and fourth attempt for the weekend.  We ate and then Dominica and I headed south on Interstate 390 directly from there.

It was just a little after midnight when we arrived in Newark.  The trip went pretty well.  No issues and very little excess traffic.  Taking the Interstate 99 corridor through central Pennsylvania really makes a difference in avoiding the traffic jams.  The trip seemed to go by pretty quickly.  Dominica only had to nap for the last portion of the trip and I just listened to ITConversations on my iPod.

July 5: Camping, Sort Of

The verdict is that we really like camping with our new camping equipment.  We didn’t bring quite as much equipment as we had have having skimped on the sleeping bag and going with nothing but a sheet between us and the cold air mattress but we won’t make that mistake next weekend.  Oreo thought that sleeping outside in the tent was the greatest thing ever.  He had a wonderful time.

Colemand Weathermaster Elite Screened Tent

The one thing that we realized is a problem with us camping is that Dominica has to make several trips to the restroom during the night since she is pregnant and being far away from the restroom isn’t very convenient for her.  Oreo also seems to like the proximity of the great outdoors and chooses to go out in the middle of the night causing additional disruption.

We did get very good sleep, however, and were well rested and very happy in the morning.  The tent allowed us so much fresh air – not like any camping that I had ever attempted before.  And for just the two of us (and the dog) the tent is incredibly spacious.  I think that we are very likely to attempt camping on our own in the very near future.  Oreo would definitely enjoy that.  Maybe we will try camping in Maine or Canada although there are lots of state parks that can work as well.

We have most of the gear that we need.  That new electrical stuff, which will be cheap, a power adapter and some organizers for the inside of the tent should do the trick.  We need places to put our stuff that are up off of the floor.  We will be taking “camping chairs” as well to set up in our porch area which we didn’t use at all this time.  Other than that we seemed to be pretty well stocked.  We are not attempting to cook in any way this time so there is a lot of potential problems in that area that we have yet to tackle.

We left the tent set up as we are going to be using it again tonight.  We had wanted to go to the Omega Grill in Geneseo for breakfast this morning but we got up a little too late as I was scheduled to work at ten in the morning.

I worked for several hours taking up the bulk of the middle of the day.  Since we couldn’t go out for breakfast or lunch we ordered pizza from Davis’ Farm Market in Pavilion and dad went down and picked it up.

After lunch the Ralstons came up with Settlers and we played for a while and visited.  They had just a small, mid-afternoon window to see us so we didn’t get to hang out for very long.  Michael went out with his Nintendo DS and played in the screened porch area of the tent.  That is something that we are going to attempt to bring next weekend when we do real camping – our Nintendo DS and Sony PSPs.  That way there is definitley stuff to do while in the tent.  We have games for both systems that we have never even played!

The Ralstons left around four in the afternoon and I worked for another hour or so until we drove up to Geneseo to meet my Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo at the Shang Hai restaurant for dinner.  Then, after dinner, we came back down to Peoria and drove down to the new construction on NY Route 63. We walked around the new intersection to check out how the work is progressing.  It is really coming along quickly.

We looked at about 500 slides from around 1982 to 1984 that dad had mostly from the construction of his house.  Dominica had never seen pictures of what the farm looked like with the old 1904 farmhouse and the cabana, swimming pool, etc.  It was pretty interesting.  Now she understands what a strange childhood I had.  That old house was really crazy.  Dad and I are trying to figure out how to get all of those old slides converted to digital so that we can get them up on line.  Now that the baby is coming it is more important than ever to get all of that history somewhere before it is too late.

We camped back out in the tent again tonight.  Oreo is used to it already and went right on out and climbed on in.  This is his new favorite place to sleep.  He is really exhausted tonight after spending the day playing on the farm.

July 4, 2008: Test Camping

Dominica, Oreo and I got a little chance to sleep in this morning which is good as it was pretty late by the time that we managed to get to sleep last night.  We spent the morning and the beginning of the afternoon visiting with Dominica’s parents.  Her mother is flying to Houston early this afternoon, from Albany, so that she, Francesca and the kids can drive from Houston to Frankfort over the weekend.

Dominica at our Camp Site

We left Frankfort to head to dad’s house just after Dominica’s parents headed out to Albany.  It was probably just before three when we hit the road with the BMW loaded down with camping gear to test out this weekend.

We met dad at the Omega Grill for dinner around six but the grill was closed for the holiday so we went over to Denny’s instead where my cousin’s friend from high school (York) was working as the hostess.  The same friend that I once sat next to at a McDonald’s near Philly completely by coincidence.

After dinner we went back to dad’s house and got right to work setting up the camping equipment in the back yard.  This was the first time for either of us to really be putting up a tent so it was a bit of an experience but it went pretty smoothly.  No real hassles.  It took about twenty or twenty-five minutes to set it all up.

We had a lot of fun trying out all of the new gear like the ceiling fans and lighting systems.  The built in Coleman florescent lighting system in our tent is really impressive.  It works by remote control – which is great for finding your tent in the dark – and is a regular 15W bulb so it is really bright for such a small space.  You can work in the tent just like it was a house.

The tent is really well ventilated as well with the top and sides being almost completely wide open.  The only real disappointment is that the screened porch area does not have a “floor” so it can’t be used as a part of the main tent.  We were happy to discover that the tent has a handy electrical cord port to make powering the tent even easier since we have to have the CPAP in it.

Our next bits of camping gear will be “in tent” organizers to put our clothes and things on as well as an AC to DC “power system” so that the overhead light is powered via the AC rather than off of batteries.  That will make the packing smaller and lighter and cheaper too and let us use the light all that we want without feeling like we are wasting batteries.  We will likely also get a chargeable D battery system so that we can just charge batteries as they are needed in the tent rather than buying tons of expensive D batteries and throwing them away.  What a waste that can be.

We watched a little television with dad tonight before heading out to the yard to go to bed.  We didn’t want to be out there early at all because the yard is covered in Japanese beetles which are perfectly content to land on your head and to get all over the tent.  We got to see an episode of Eli Stone which dad has been telling us about for a while.  It is his favorite new show, I believe.

Around eleven, Dominica, Oreo and I went on out to the tent to try our first night of camping in our new tent.  This is Dominica’s first ever night sleeping in a tent and my first time since June, 1994 when Eric and I went camping in Pennsylvania.