I had dinner and a few wines with a good friend on Friday night. He is interested in network analysis and wanted to read some materiel that is grounded and relatively easy to understand. I'm also having dinner with a PhD student from ANU on Thursday night. I have no doubt the same topic will come up, although he will want something more substantial. Coincidentally Professor Barry Wellman and Professor Alexandra Marin , have just published "Social Network Analysis: An introduction ", which is a draft chapter for an upcoming book on social network analysis. It's very readable and a succinct introduction, and one that I would highly recommend to anyone.

Of course it's very hard to go past the resources available at INSNA , and particularly Connections , which is a peer-reviewed journal and the definitive source for reliable grounded work. A recent issue of Methodological Innovations presents some good quality articles on social network analysis. The articles on both sites can be downloaded for free.

I bought "Tools for Complex Projects " because I saw a brochure advertising it and an associated course, which seemed to deal with network analysis in a project management environment. Unfortunately it didn't, but I don't regret buying the book. In fact it has been one of the most interesting and enlightening books on project management that I have bought in a long time.

The book is organised into two sections. The first section has a theoretical bent and deals with complexity. Typically project complexity is defined in terms of scale, cost, and risk, but Remington and Pollack classify projects as structurally complex, technically complex, directionally complex, and/or temporarily complex. I found this classification both interesting and useful: so useful in fact that I decided to use it in my PhD, and it's something I'll blog about in the near future. The second section provides some tools and methods to deal with the different types of complexity. I've scribbled notes all over the book, which is an indication of its usefulness to me.