I have not read the book, however, the missing subjects you speak of could be covered by a generic leadership book.
I agree with your sentiments - as a team leader myself I have come to appreciate that the realy challenging aspects of the job are around human issues. The technical bit comes naturally, it's the human bit which is really tough; as technical beasts though, we tend to concentrate on what we deem tractable and shy away from what is obviously hard.
I think the intent of the book was not to promote leadership, but to help you in writing industry-leading code. Two different meanings for "Code Leader."
I've read the book and it's pretty good - for teams that don't know what continuous integration is or how to get it going, for teams who don't use source control or why it's useful... this is good stuff. I think there are more people out there than we realize that aren't using some of these best practices and the book definitely fills that void.
On the other hand, you're right - it doesn't matter if you have all these practices outlined if you can't get the team to follow them.
One book you might want to check out along those lines is "Peopleware" by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. It's written from more of a "management" perspective than a "leader" perspective, but it touches on some of the soft skills that are missing from other books.
Roy,
that part is definitely missing from the book, largely because my goal was to deal with the technical issues. I agree 100% that you can't be a team lead without those "soft" skills that people often overlook. Do you think there are issues of team leadership that apply only to software teams and aren't covered in the "generic" management books?
I would say that there are unique management soft skills for the software development environment that differ from the generic management books. Software developers tend to be very smart, and this requires a unique approach to management that most generic management books don't cover very well.
I think you're right on the money when it comes to the technical approach, and if there are teams out there that are still not using source control _shudder_ I wouldn't want to be their customer.
Perhaps in version 2.0 of "Code Leader" you can delve into some of the "soft" skills required :-)