When it comes to teaching and learning, nothing beats a good ol' book, even in 2008.

It is with that in mind that we have begun offering book excerpts to readers of ConstructionSoftwareReview.com. When we introduced you to Building Information Modeling in back in September, we pointed you to our excerpt from McGraw-Hill Professional's aptly titled Building Information Modeling.

Now we are happy to offer two sets of excerpts for construction project management professionals; these come to us from Paul E. Harris, an Australian author and consultant who's a certified cost engineer through AACE International and an approved trainer on the PRINCE2 project management method.

Our Primavera software book excerpts are aimed at users of P6, P3 and SureTrak. Each excerpt includes two or more chapters and demonstrates to readers practical tasks such as using Group & Sort parameters and Layout functions in Primavera P6, defining activity codes in Primavera P3 and using global and activity calendars in Primavera SureTrak.

Meanwhile, our four Microsoft Project software book excerpts each offer a different take on using MS Project for construction project management. There's a user guide for planning and scheduling, there's a list of "tricks and traps" that the author describes as "the casual user's survival guide," and there are tomes devoted to making MS Project comply with PRINCE2 and PMBOK project management principles.

Are there any books out there that have helped you understand the (software) tools that you use every day? If so, we'd love to hear about them -- and then try to provide excerpts for you the reader.