I currently have 20 books in my list of recommended books. I’ve read all of those books in the past 2 years, which means i’m averaging about 10 books a year. That’s probably a bit much, and i have to admit i’ve been reading a bit less lately than i used to. But i’ve noticed that a lot of developers that i know hardly ever read books about software development. Which is too bad, because those books really are a cheap way of investing in yourself and your career.

Well, perhaps cheap isn’t the best word to use. After all, some of these books are somewhat expensive, and buying a lot of them certainly adds up. But if you pick the right books, they are usually more than worth the money they cost. Besides, you shouldn’t just look at the price of the book. The most important thing to keep in mind is the knowledge and insight you can get from them. That typically depends on the type of books you buy though. I usually avoid books that are library/framework/language-specific, unless i am very interested in a specific topic.

The books that usually provide the biggest value are the ones that teach you things that you can use in any development environment. It can be about development methodologies, certain concepts or practices, patterns (not just design patterns but architectural patterns, coding patterns, testing patterns, …), as long as the knowledge is reusable. These kinds of books allow you to learn from the experiences of some of the best people in this industry. And the best thing about it is that you can learn a lot from these books in a few days (or weeks), even though it probably took the authors a couple of years to acquire that knowledge and experience. Isn’t that one of the coolest forms of reuse you can think of?

Now obviously, reading a couple of books won’t instantly put you on the same level as the authors, but at the very least it allows you to significantly increase your skills and insight with relatively little effort. And when you start applying that knowledge, you can start reaping the benefits of it pretty soon. It could definitely make your job easier. It most likely will increase the quality of your output at work. It almost certainly increases your value as a software developer.

So do yourself (and everyone else) a favor, and read a good book on software development once in a while. And if you need some help picking out the good books, just look here

I had very mixed feelings about this book while i was reading it. It was just so incredibly boring and pretty much impossible to continue reading for a few hours. My biggest mistake was that i was trying to read this book like i do every other book: cover to cover. And it really isn’t suited for that, unless you’re battling a sleeping disorder. It is however very valuable as a WCF reference book and if you plan on using it as such, then it definitely is worthy of recommendation. You’ll quickly find whatever it is you need to know about specific WCF area’s, but if your goal is to learn WCF, get Bustamante’s Learning WCF instead.

Finally finished reading Jon Skeet’s C# In Depth. This is the kind of book i’d been searching for for a a while: a book that only covers the language features instead of also spending time covering the basic .NET framework features which we’ve all read about more than enough already anyway. This means that the language features are covered very thoroughly, in a way you probably won’t find in any other C# book. There is a lot of very complex stuff here, but Jon Skeet manages to keep it all pretty easy to understand. You don’t really need this information to be a C# developer, but a lot of the content of the book will definitely improve your understanding of the language and depending on how you deal with that improved understanding, it enables you to do things in your code that you may never have thought were possible. The book basically covers all the important C# 2 and C# 3 features, completely skipping C# 1 except for highlighting some of its shortcomings. If you want to know everything there is to know about generics, nullable types, delegates, variable capturing with anonymous methods, implementing iterators, type inference, automatic properties, simplified initialization, anonymous types, lambda expressions and expression trees, extension methods, query expressions and how LINQ really works then this is the book for you. Well, you could study the C# lanuage specification but it won’t be near as clear as this book.

Just finished reading Release It! The subtitle of the book is: Design and deploy production-ready software. And this book really offers a lot of great advice on how to do exactly that. In the first two parts, patterns (and anti-patterns) are provided to show you how you can ensure stability and capacity in your systems. These two parts alone are already tremendously valuable, but there is a lot more goodness in this book. The book also gives excellent advice on how to configure your network of servers, security and passwords, load balancing and clustering, dealing with configuration files, making your system transparent for Operations and making your software adaptable to future changes. The author uses excellent real-word examples throughout the book to stress the importance of the advice he offers. When you skim over the table of contents before reading it, you might think not every part of this book will interest you as much as the others, but the author’s writing style really does keep everything at least interesting, and in most cases, even fascinating. And often, quite funny as well.

Just finished reading James Shore & Shane Warden’s The Art Of Agile Development. The title says it’s about agile development, but this book is very specifically about Extreme Programming, other agile methodologies aren’t covered. A lot of the content of this book applies to other agile methodologies as well though. This book does an amazing job of not only showing you what agile development ideally looks like, but also gives a lot of tips and helpful information on how to get to that point. After a thorough introduction on agile development and XP, the book covers a large list of XP values, principles and practices, grouped together in different categories: Thinking, Collaborating, Releasing, Planning and Developing. Each practice is covered very thoroughly and clearly. Finally, the book closes with a few more chapters on how to master your agility as a team after you’ve gotten used to the values, principles and practices covered earlier. This is one of the best books on software development you’ll ever read.

I kinda like my list of recommended books… it’s a very easy way to point someone to a good book or two

But simply grouping them as ‘Must Read’ and ‘Highly Recommended’ was not such a good idea, so now i’ve grouped them in the following categories:

• Writing Code / Working With Code
• Software architecture/design
• Language/Technology specific
• Software development approaches/practices/methodologies

Chech out the list and buy those books! The money you spend on them will be earned back continuously through the raises you’ll eventually get after properly using their knowledge

A new book from Kent Beck about writing code? I just couldn’t resist ordering it. Implementation Patterns is a (very short) book with the goal of helping you communicate your intentions as a developer through your code. The patterns in this book are all very short, and usually are nothing more than simple descriptions of different implementation choices that you as a developer can make.

Don’t think that these patterns are similar to design patterns or anything like that… these patterns are about how and when you should create classes, how to deal with state in classes and methods, how to implement behaviour, dealing with exceptional flow and exceptions, different ways of defining and implementing methods, choosing between collection types, and there’s even a chapter that deals with some of the complications of developing frameworks and allowing the framework to evolve while minimizing or avoiding breaking code for clients of the framework.

This book is just filled with a lot of great insight on how to write code that clearly expresses the intent of what it’s supposed to do. And while it is a very short book (only 130 pages), it’s one of those books that’ll teach you something new every time you read it. Must read!

So i finally got around to reading Frederick P. Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month. Many people consider this book a timeless classic. I don’t entirely agree with this though. It is a very good book, and a lot of the stuff in it is awfully familiar even though it’s written 30 years ago. But because it’s been written 30 years ago, there really are some parts that have become kinda dated. And I’m not even talking about the references to writing code. Those are actually interesting, from a more historical point of view. But I don’t really agree on his views on the role and power of the architect of the system. In fact, his entire Surgical Team (as he calls it) does not look appealing to me at all… it kinda conflicts with the world of agile development that we know of today. Since this is the 20th anniversary edition, the book also contains a nice chapter where he looks back on the opinions that he asserted in the original version, and corrects a few of them. That chapter was also written 10 years ago though, so I’d actually love to hear how he feels about a couple of his stated opinions these days. Don’t get the wrong idea though, i really enjoyed reading this book and most of the human and social aspects of software development that he talks about are very insightful and definitely still relevant if you’re in the business of software development, regardless of if you’re a manager or a developer or whatever. Highly recommended.

I’ve been pretty busy with non-IT related stuff the last few weeks, that’s why it’s been so quiet around here. I did finally finish Michele Bustamante’s Learning WCF book. This one is definitely going on my ‘Highly Recommended’ list. While it certainly won’t make you an expert on WCF, you do get a pretty good grasp on how it works, what’s possible with it, and how you use it. The book mainly covers contracts, bindings, hosting options, instancing and concurrency options, service reliability, security and dealing with exceptions/faults. If you want to ease into the WCF world, this book is perfect for you.

I used to have a list of recommended books on my site but since i hardly use that anymore, i’m moving most of the content here. You can find the list here or click on ‘Recommended Books’ in the Navigation entry on the right. I’ll keep that list updated when i have new books to recommend