Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

Although I bought refactoring book by Martin Fowler years ago it is still valid. I call it one of the timeless books about coding and I consider it as a mandatory reading specially for novice programmers who are entering the field. Of course it is also useful handbook for those already in business. This refactoring book covers and organizes most of changes we are doing to source code every day and it greatly helps us to understand the nature of those changes at crafting level.

Read more

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software

Design Patterns is golden classics of software design books written by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides (aka Gang of Four – GoF). When this book was published first it was revolutionary because it contained still undocumented knowledge from software development field that needed some systematic work and organization on it. Today we see these patterns in many programs and developers on different platforms are more and more aware of these first defined design patterns. If you are software developer then this is must-have book for you.

Read more

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

Lately I finished reading the famous patterns book by Martin Fowler – Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. This book introduces and describes design patterns you will usually see when building enterprise applications. There are also examples for patterns and although they are simple and primitive they give you the idea how to implement or use specific patterns. If you are working on enterprise applications every day you will find this book very useful and I’m sure you will use it as manual.

Read more

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

Writing code that is easy read and test is not something that is easy to achieve. Unfortunately there are still way too much programming students who write awful spaghetti after graduating. But there is one really good book that helps you raise your code to new level – your code will be also communication tool for you and your fellow programmers.

Read more

Why Software Sucks…and What You Can Do About It

How do our users see the products we are writing for them and how happy they are with our work? Are they able to get their work done without fighting with cool features and crashes or are they just switching off resistance part of their brain to survive our software? Yeah, the overall picture of software usability landscape is not very nice. Okay, it is not even nice. But, fortunately, Why Software Sucks…and What You Can Do About It by David S. Platt explains everything.

Read more

Agile Database Techniques: Effective Strategies for the Agile Software Developer

Agile development expects mind shift and developers are not the only ones who must be agile. Every chain is as strong as it’s weakest link and same goes also for development teams. Agile Database Techniques: Effective Strategies for the Agile Software Developer by Scott W. Ambler is book that calls also data professionals to be part of agile development.

Read more

The Mythical Man-Month

Yesterday I finished reading the classic project management book The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick P. Brooks. Well… this book made me think a lot about nature of software projects, how primitive is our understanding about them and why managing such projects is usually hard fighting with a lot of different issues. The book has also interesting content from the past that is really interesting reading. To understand where you are you should know where you come from.

Read more

Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#

Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C# by Robert C. Martin and Micah Martin describes how to write software using C#. Book covers also most important design patterns and object-oriented development principles. There are very good, close to reality examples for every topic and that makes this book pretty easy to read and understand.

Read more

Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day

One of my SEO school books is Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day by Jennifer Grappone (The Right Brain) and Gradiva Couzin (The Left Brain). I knew already how and what to do before but this book gave very good plan to follow to get SEO process under strict control. Authors of this book have also web site Your SEO Plan where you can download all process organizing tables in Excel format.

Read more

Death March

This winter I read book Death March by Edward Yourdon. Death March is about death march projects and how to survive them. There are also chapters describing decisions that you should never make when managing death march project. And there are great tips that help you avoid bad mistakes in death march projects. The book describes also developers life in such projects and gives them some good advises how to stay alive.

Read more

Extreme Programming Explained

Extreme Programming Explained is overview and guide to extreme programming (XP). The author of this book – Kent Beck – is well known XP evangelist with great experiences on the field. XP is not very simple thing to start with when one has worked some years on “classic” way. Kent shows us the way to XP and gives great explanations and suggestion about how to get started with XP.

Read more

Software Estimation – Demystifying the Black Art

Software Estimation – Demystifying the Black Art is another masterpiece by Steve McConnell. I introduced in last june book Code Complete 2 by same author – it is suggested reading for developers. Software Estimation, as title sais, tells about how to estimate software projects. Estimating is not easy thing to do if you want to achieve good estimates.

Read more