The book takes the reader through Kishoreji’s journey of building a great retail business in India from scratch. Author recounts on how he started as an ordinary cloth seller in Mumbai and eventually how he established the giant retail business spread over a few hundred cities in India serving millions of Indian consumers.

The unique and interesting point I liked about this book is: Kishoreji’s friends, relatives and employees of the company share their experiences about being associated with Kishoreji and give the reader a deep insight into Kishoreji’s personal and as well entrepreneurial abilities.

Kishoreji takes the reader through his childhood days, college life and finally how he had left the usual way of doing family business and started his own journey on a road called entrepreneurship, which most of the young Indians now are aspiring to travel.

Doing something that opposes the established system of beliefs is not an easy task. An entire chapter titled ‘Defying the Odds’ is dedicated to how he started Pantaloon Shoppe amidst very testing and difficult times.

He talks about building emotional connect with consumers. He emphasizes on how he brought Indianness to the business and how he studied Indian consumers with passion. He confided that even till today he visits some of his stores and observes the consumers to understand their needs and their thoughts.

KB emphasizes on relationships throughout the book: relationships with customers, employees, share holders and most importantly family and friends. He also emphasizes on building trust and the importance of mutual trust in relationships.

Kishoreji has even shared about his failed businesses. KB explained about how he tried to enter into movie making in the bollywood but could not produce a huge success there. In a whole chapter dedicated to his bollywood stint, he shared his learnings from this failed attempt of movie-making.

Its an inspiring story every budding entrepreneur should read. The book has something for everyone. If you are aspiring for a career in retail you have a lot to read from a man who built everything from nothing. If you are a casual book reader, even then you have a lot to appreciate and learn.

Finally, it costs only 99 rupees! Go and get a copy for you and I assure you that the time and money you spent is worth the effort.

Here are few inspiring lines I am reproducing from the book with all the due credit given to the authors.

I based everything on one philosophy ‘Rewrite Rules. Retain Values’. Chase your dreams but don’t compromise on your belief system.

Entrepreneurship is about thinking big, believing in your own ability and going ahead with huge risks even if you are aware that some of the ventures may not be successful. It’s also about making decisions, leadership, and about making your colleagues believe in you dream.

When one is young and tries to rewrite rules, he is called ‘mad.’ But when he is finally successful, because he dared to risk it, he is called a ‘maverick.’

By the time one manages to get out of the control of one’s family, one loses his zeal and becomes complacent with what has already been created.

Clinton clearly explains how each of us with the given resources and abilities can make the world a better place to live. Primarily Clinton talks about giving:

1. Money
2. Time
3. Things
4. Skills

Each of the chapters has many inspiring stories of individuals and organizations who are trying to change the world by giving. One can find the stories of men and women who traded in their corporate careers, and the fulfillment they now experience through giving.

Though the book is full of statistics and frequent references to Clinton Foundation, at the end, it really inspires the reader to consider giving something to make the world a better place to live. With the help of real life accounts of many individuals, the book clearly explains - irrespective of income, available time, skills and where one lives - how one can take part of the initiatives and take new initiatives to make this planet earth a more better place.

I have taken three stories from the book and explained in short about the people and their giving. Hope these stories will give you an idea about what is covered in the book and inspire you to read the book.

• McKenzie Steiner organized a beach cleanup with her friends in California at the age of six. When Clinton asked her why she did, she said “Sometimes animals die from people littering in the ocean….I felt better for helping animals and people coming to the beach to swim.” At the very age of six McKenzie Steiner found a way to give her time for a good cause. Children often dream things which we adults think are impossible our of various reasons.
• Dr. Paul Farmer, who grew up in poverty and for the most of his childhood, lived in the family bus in Florida trailer park, even before getting a degree from Harvard Medical School, he vowed to devote his life to give high quality medical care to the poor. He is one of the founders of Partners in Health organization which provides health care for the poor. This story will demonstrate the incredible impact of one person with a fine mind, boundless energy and a passion for justice.
• The story of an eighty-seven-year-old black woman from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, is one of the most inspiring stories in the book. Oseola McCarty was a local washer woman who gave $1,50,000 to the The University of Southern Mississippi to endow a scholarship fund for African-American students in financial need. For more than seventy five years she eked out for a living washing and ironing other people’s clothes. She dropped out of school in the sixth grade and never returned.

There are many more stories to inspire you and to show you that one need not be Bill Gates or Warren Buffet to change the world. Each of us can make those little changes that will help others to live more happily. ‘Giving’ is all about having a more kinder heart and understanding the difficulties of others and sharing one’s fortunes to bring happiness into others’ lives.

Will giving make you happier? If you have already given any of the offerings - time, money, things, skills - you obviously know that it will indeed make a person more happier than possessing any material things.

Overall, I found the book to be an inspiring read. Though the book is full of statistics and initiatives of Clinton Foundation itself, its worth the time spent reading this book. You finish the book with a positive feeling that finally the world is changing and becoming a more better place to live. Most importantly you will start considering how you take part in changing the world in your own little ways.

John Wood was Microsoft’s Director of Business Development for the Greater China region when he decided to say good bye to the corporate world and enter the world of non-profits by helping the poor children in the developing world to give the lifelong gift of education. The core belief of ‘Room to Read’ is, ‘world change starts with educated children‘.

The defining moment of John Wood’s life had happened when he was trekking in Nepal on a vacation to escape from the work. One day, Wood met Pasupathi, resource person for that province and responsible for providing facilities in the schools of that province. Along with Pasupathi, Wood visited a school, which is supposed to be the biggest school in that area. He could not believe his eyes and was moved by the way school had been operating. He was confronted by the harsh reality that there were no books in the library that a child can read and the class rooms were accommodating more children than they actually can. After interacting with the school headmaster and teachers, he promised them that he would return with books and help the school build a better library. Then the headmaster of the school said, ‘Perhaps, sir, you will someday come back with books.‘ In the book, he shares that these words had really changed the course of his life forever.

An year later, John Wood did exactly what he promised the headmaster and the teachers of that school. With the help of his friends and family, he was able to collect a large number of books and went to Nepal to distribute the books. But, Wood felt the task was not finished. There were literally hundreds of schools with not enough books and few communities did not have schools in the neighborhood and children had to walk for few kilometers to reach a nearby school. He thought, there was something more that he can do to address this issue throughout Nepal.

The following year John left Microsoft and established a non-profit to send books to Nepal. You should read the book to know how this small project to help build a library in rural Nepal school has now become a world famous organization with operations in nine countries in Asia and Africa. Ever since it’s inception, Room to Read has impacted the lives of over 1.3 million children by: constructing schools, establishing libraries, publishing local language titles for children books, girl scholarships and establishing computer labs.

‘Leaving Microsoft to Change the World‘ is one of those few books which everyone will like to read. No matter where you live and what is your work, you are going to remember this book for a lifetime. The story is so inspiring and uplifting that you will start considering doing something to make the world a better place to live. Most of us have taken the education for granted, but that is not the case in the developing world where standard education is a dream for millions of children, and that dream will only come true when people like John Wood dedicate their entire lives to make that dream become a reality. Keep a box of tissues handy. Few of the lines are so moving that I was brought to tears while reading.

I finish this review by asking you to go and buy the book and share the story with your friends and ask them to read. I am very sure that you are going to like this book and every second is worth spent reading this book.

Videos you might be interested to watch:

• Room To Read - Leaving Microsoft To Change the World
• John Wood speaking at The Power Within

• Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur’s Odyssey to Educate the World’s Children - By John Wood
• Banker to the Poor: The Autobiography of Muhammad Yunus
• How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition - By David Bornstein
  
• The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Fable About Fulfilling Your Dreams & Reaching Your Destiny - By Robin Sharma
• Who Will Cry When You Die? Life Lessons from the Monk Who Sold His Ferrari - By Robin Sharma
• Megaliving - By Robin Sharma
• Screw It, Let’s Do It: Lessons In Life (Quick Reads) - By Richard Branson
• The Secret Teachings of the Vedas - By Stephen Knapp
• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
• The Power of Your Subconscious Mind - By Joseph Murphey
  

Authors: Cameron Adams, Jina Bolton, David Johnson, Steve Smith, Jonathan Snook

The book contains seven chapters.

Chapter 1: Headings

In this chapter you will learn why headings are most important in branding a website and you will get to know some websites which effectively convey the structure using perfect usage of headings.

The main concepts explained in this chapter are accessible image replacement methods and sIFR. I really liked the detailed tips for using sIFR. You will learn everything you ever wanted to know about using sIFR in your projects.

Chapter 2: Images

In this chapter you will learn how to build a photo gallery using CSS. You will learn how to create effective captions for the images using some CSS techniques and png images.

Chapter 3: Backgrounds

You will start with learning the background properties and then work with a case study. This case study will explain you how effectively you can use the background images with minimal markup to create stunning websites. To add more to this you will look into adding multiple backgrounds for a single element in CSS3. Though CSS3 is not supported by mainstream browsers now, you will get to know how CSS3 will help you to remove all that tag soup from your markup.

Chapter 4: Navigation

To summarize in a line “You will learn all that you ever wanted to know about creating vertical, horizontal and tabbed navigations”.

After leaning the basics of navigation techniques you will get to know how a single navigation matrix image can be used to style all the elements in the navigation bar.

Chapter 5: Forms

Forms are very important user interaction elements in any website. Apart from the hyper links form elements are the most used interaction elements. This chapter will show you the techniques to design froms that look very stylish. The beauty of the techniques is that they are even accessible for screen readers. So, you will learn how to create accessible, stylish and sexy forms that are easy to use for the user.

Chapter 6: Rounded Corners

You will start with creating a simple fixed width rounded corner with flexible vertical height. Then you will learn how to create a flexible rounded corner which will work for any width and height values. After knowing how to create rounded corner elements, you will learn how to create a rounded corner layout.

Chapter 7: Tables

You will learn how you can style tables beautifully and in a cross browser way. You will explore the possibilities CSS3 is going to offer us for styling the tables.

Though its not full of inspiring and creative ideas, but its really worth reading to master the techniques which we will use almost in any website design.

Finally, this book is ideal for anyone who is just started with CSS design, knows some basics and wants to know how to create beautiful websites using practical CSS techniques. I would not suggest this book as a beginners guide kind of thing. Though all the techniques are explained in depth, its very difficult for a novice to read through the chapters. Other than that, its really worth one’s time reading this book and get some great tips from the expert authors. One more great book from Sitepoint.

Hope you enjoyed reading this review.

Books tag line: “Its a magical fable about following your dream”.

The story is about a shepherd boy, who has a dream about finding a treasure in the pyramids of Egypt. On the way of finding his treasure he happens to meet an old man who claims himself as King Melchizedek. The King tells the boy that “when you really desire something all the universe conspires to help you find it” and he explains the principle of favorability, or beginner’s luck. Finally the boy decides to sell his sheep and starts his adventurous journey towards the pyramids of Egypt.

In the entire book the author talks about omens and reading the omens. The author says “Omens are the individual language in which God talks to you”. Though I do not understand the complete philosophy the author has presented in this book, I am very much excited about the “beginners luck“.

From my experiences in the past 6 months I firmly believe in the philosophy of beginners luck and reading omens. I would like to share my experiences and will be really great if you can share your thoughts and experiences.

Like the shepherd boy, I have dreams and a dream of building my own software firm. I have decided to quit my well paying day job and start as a free lancer to start working towards realizing my dream. When I was about to move out of my day job in January 2007 I have bought a laptop on installments using my credit card. Due to my extravagant spending I could not save any real money during my two years stay at job. So, I didn’t even had enough money to clear my first installment. I was on an unpaid leave for almost a month and was not even expecting the salary for a week days. But, to my surprise I was credited with a salary for 31 days and a bonus amount which I had never expected. I am sure there was an error in the pay roll software which really helped me with the money when I desperately need it. This was my first dose of beginner’s luck. So, this unexpected amount helped me to clear my first installment. And yes, I know I could have informed it to my employer but I dint and you know why.

I was worried and completely confused. There was only one question in my mind. “Who is going to give me work and who is going to pay me for my services and skills?”

But to my surprise I was able to find my first client within a week’s time after becoming jobless. I happened to leave a comment on iLeher blog post, without even knowing that this comment is going to get me the first work. Then I got to interact with the iLeher team and finally ended up redesigning their blog as my first free lance work. This was my second dose of experiencing beginner’s luck. Was that an omen which made me to leave a comment on their blog?

Then came the second work. I was given with a task of designing the user interface of a photo sharing web site. I almost worked on it for 10 days. After few of the pages are finished, then the team decided not to go ahead with the venture due to their personal issues. But I got a decent amount of money which helped me in clearing my laptop installment. So, what if they had decided not to go with the venture before I came in contact with them? Is this beginners luck?

Then I got another work from a referral given by my first client.

When I was just worried about clearing my last installment, I just happened to leave a comment on a blog. And to my surprise the blog author’s friend was looking for a web site design project and I got a mail from the author asking me if I could help his friend in making his website. After few initial discussions I was able to get the project. So, again I experienced the beginners luck and reading omens. Believe me, I still do not know what made me to visit the blog or from where I got the link to the blog. Are these omens sent to us by God?

So, I really started thinking about whether its really beginner’s luck or a mere coincidence as we call it generally. I think I will never come to a conclusion on this.

So, is it true that “When you really want something, all the universe conspires to help you achieve it“?

I am sure I am not going to find answers to all my queries very soon. But I started believing that there is some universal power which helps us.

Though the book has some magical elements in it, the overall theme is great. I have put up a list of inspiring lines here.

So, finally, have you ever experienced beginners luck? May it be in any field business, education, job and etc. It would be really great to hear your comments and experiences. Please use the comments section to share your thoughts.

Thank you for reading.

-Chandra

1. Its the possibility of having a dream coming true that makes life interesting.
2. It’s the simple things in life that are the most extra ordinary; only wise men are able to understand them.
3. If someone isn’t what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.
4. He never realized that people are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of.
5. Don’t forget to follow your destiny through to its conclusion.
   
6. I’m like everyone else - I see the world in terms of what I would like to see happen not what actually does.
7. We have to take advantage when luck is on our side, and do as much to help it as it’s doing to help us. It’s called the principle of favorability. Or beginner’s luck.
8. You must always know what it is that you want.
9. Never stop dreaming.
10. When you want something, all the universe conspires to help you achieve it.
11. Making a decision is only the beginning of things.
12. The close one gets to realizing his destiny, the more that destiny becomes his true reason for being.
13. People need not fear the unknown if they are capable of achieving what they need and want.
14. When you can’t go back, you have to worry only about the best way of moving forward. The rest is up to Allah, including the danger.
15. If you can concentrate always on present, you’ll be a happy man.
16. When a person really desires something, all the universe conspires to help that person to realize his dream.
17. One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.
18. People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don’t deserve them, or that they’ll be unable to achieve them.
19. There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.
20. Usually the threat of death makes people a lot more aware of their lives.

After reading ‘The Alchemist‘ I started reading other works of Paulo Coelho. I really like the way he explains the philosophy in an interestingly written fiction.

Believe me, I have read this book in a single day. Once I started reading it in the morning, I couldn’t stop in between and read the book from end to end.
I think this is one of the best technical books I have ever read.

The author Jeremy Keith has a solid approach to make sure that you learn the fundamentals of DOM and then shows you how DOM can help you in increasing the usability of your website. He explains you how to separate structure from behavior. Once you have completed this book you will never ever write “onclick”, “onmouehover” “javascript:functioncall” and etc… in your HTML markup.

You don’t need to know much about JavaScript to understand this book, there is a refresher chapter on JavaScript too.

He explains all the concepts in DOM using Photo Gallery script. In every chapter you will refine the code written in the previous chapter and at the end of the book you know how to build a real world Photo Gallery script. You will wonder how easy it is to produce simple animations in JavaScript with few lines of code.

Stop, Hey did I hear you saying “JavaScript is not accessible”?…. If you read this book you will learn how easy it is to make JavaScript accessible.

Book’s Website: Dom Scripting Book

I would give 10/10 for this book.

After reading this book I have implemented a small widget for this blog. You can see it in action on the home page. This widget will create a list of links to all posts on the home page and gives the user a quick way to jump to the interesting post. A simple JavaScript hook has done all the work for me. No extra markup or no need to change the structure of my xHTML markup.
Hope you enjoyed reading this review.