For the “Software Best Practices” seminars where I’ll be speaking in Austin tomorrow, I’ve made a substantial number of updates and refinements to the material that I presented in Ft. Lauderdale a couple days ago. The material is fundamentally the same as before, but I’ve added a couple more recommended books, papers, and articles — as well as numerous hyperlinks to help explain and define terms and concepts that might not be familiar to all readers. I don’t think it’s worth the effort to enumerate the changes; if you really care, I suggest that you open this current set of materials, side-by-side with the previous version, and compare them on a page-by-page basis.

As usual, I’ve provided several different ways of downloading the presentation materials. None of the material is copyrighted; it’s all “open source,” and you’re welcome to use it, modify it, share it with friends and colleagues, and collaborate with me to improve it in the days to come. For a simple overview of the presentation, you can click here to download the one-page, 24-megabyte PDF version of the “mind-map” shown below. This is likely to make more sense after you’ve seen the full set of materials, but it’s a nice concise summary of the key elements of the presentation.

You can also click here to download a 10.4-megabyte PDF version of the 19-page presentation itself; all of the embedded hyperlinks have been preserved, so you can follow the references to wherever they lead you. You can also find this version on my Slideshare.net page, which makes it easy to share the material with other people in your own network.

A couple days ago, in Ft. Lauderdale, I also made a Powerpoint version available; but I discovered that moving a Powerpoint file from the Mac to Windows is problematic, especially if you’re using something other than the usual boring Arial/Helvetica fonts; and since I find Powerpoint to be a pain in the neck anyway, I’ve thrown it out. If you have the good sense to be using a Macintosh and iWork, then you can click here to download the 15-megabyte Keynote file of the same presentation (which has the animations and builds that you won’t see in the PDF version, plus the native ability to modify the material). And finally, if you’d like to see the “collaborative” version (which is much uglier, but nevertheless sharable), click here to see the Google Apps version of the same material; if you actually want to modify this version, send me an email and I’ll add you to the list of collaborators.

Hopefully, this will be sufficient to let you view and access the materials in a way that’s convenient for you. If you have any questions or problems, please let me know. Meanwhile, enjoy …