Have you ever dreamed of being a consultant? Here's a guide to how software consulting firms work and how to avoid some of the pitfalls In “The Nomadic Developer: Surviving and Thriving in the World of Technology Consulting” (Addison-Wesley, 2009, 408 pp, ISBN-10 0321606396, $39.99), Aaron Erickson of Magenic Technologies offers up a light-hearted but practical guide to software consulting.[ Keep up with app dev issues and trends with InfoWorld’s Fatal Exception and Strategic Developer blogs. ]It isn’t all peaches and cream, by any means. It’s easy to wind up at a consultancy with major problems, but Erickson has identified “The Seven Deadly Firms,” or seven of the common ways consulting companies can go wrong, from having a sales force that says yes to everything, to a personality cult around the CEO. Erickson has also identified concrete ways to spot these problems before you commit yourself to the ninth circle of hell. Do you have your own consulting war stories? Please tell me about them in the comments to this posting.Disclosure: I was a technical reviewer for this book. Technology Industry