The Worst of the IT Skeptic

At last, for fans of the IT Skeptic, The Worst of the IT Skeptic is on sale: a compilation of posts from the last three years so that you can conveniently read the wickedest wackiest wittiest posts from your favourite IT bombast.

This content is delivered to you in a special media presentation technology known as a "book": affordable, flexible, robust, light, compact, wireless, with a remarkably low power consumption, zero boot time, integral bookmarking and annotation functions, permitted on airplanes even during takeoff and landing, and readable in daylight.

"Never mind the quality, feel the width." 360 pages of the IT Skeptic is just perfect for the upcoming Northern hemisphere summer. Everyone wants something not too heavy but still mentally stimulating and of course amusing, and thick, to take on holiday. This book is just right.

The book is a collection of all the good stuff from this blog, some of it directly extracted and some merged, revised and edited. We had to draw the line somewhere so we drew it at the end of 2008. A few other pieces come from the blog’s newsletter The Skeptical Informer, articles by the author, and the author’s other books Introduction to Real ITSM and Owning ITIL® .

Topics covered include ITIL, certification, exams, itSMF, CMDB, TSO, COBIT, Web 2.0, open source, open content, post-modernism and iPhones, not to mention governance, telcos, privacy and acoustic shock.

Like ancient Rome, the book is in three roughly equal parts:

1. The Blog and its Range: an introduction to the blog and its characters, and a selection of some of the wider ranging ideas discussed
2. ITIL and CMDB, including Service Management, ITIL V3, and ITIL the Hype
3. The IT Industry, including Castle ITIL, Crap Factoids, and a vendor roll-call of those on the receiving end of the IT Skeptic

The Worst of the IT Skeptic is available from Lulu or Amazon.com for a very reasonable $19.95 + p&p (5.5¢ per page!). I find it hard to imagine people relaxing over an electronic book, but that's just me: apparently there are plenty of you out there, so just for you this book is also available as digital download for only $15.95.

When you read it, please give me feedback

For complex reasons the book will never be available on European Amazons - there is no profit.