I just read and finished Behind Closed Doors over the weekend. It’s a very quick, very good primer on how to be a good manager. I’m spoiled because I’ve worked for an absolutely fabulous manager for three and a half years now that does everything in this book and more. I’ve done a lot of reading on management (for a developer), and I recognize lots of bits and pieces from other books in this book (yes, they are properly attributed).

So this book is a great, simple place to start for new managers. My one criticism is that it almost makes it look too easy. The difference between bad, average, and good is fairly subtle, and I don’t know that if you haven’t been studying under a good manager that it would quite as obvious how to proceed.

For me it’s a great start though; a quick retelling in a practical sense of a lot that I’ve read over the past year or so, with a lot of restatement and checklist-style presentment of things you can use to remind yourself of what you should be doing. And then you have all the references to follow up on, which you’ll need to because there is very little discussion of the theories behind these ideas.

Still, very fast read, very practical and useful immediately for beginning managers.