Books

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.

Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister is golden classic book that can be considered as mandatory reading for software

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.

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.

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.

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master is good reading for all developers and good addition to Ship it! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects. The Pragmatic Programmer is about developers everyday work and provides solutions and ideas about how to solve problems we may face more than once.

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.

I finished yesterday another great book: Ship it! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projectsfrom pragmatic series. This book is not theory book that leaves you with many questions and no idea how to move along. Instead, you get an good idea about how to develop software and manage software projects successfully.

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.

Getting Results From Software Development Teams is book about software projects management. Author of this book, Lawrence J. Peters, is one of the veterans in field who has worked on software projects management over 40 years. I think it is solid experience to share with others.

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.