These are the technical/programming books that I read last year.
Most of them were good, while some of them did not live up to my
expectations (and the price tag).
Managing Humans Michael Rands Lopp A collection of entries from his widely read and highly regarded blog.
If you read the blog, you know what the book is about. It‘s sane,
practical, down to earth advice presented in Rands‘ unique manner that
many try to copy but seldom succeed.
Pragmatic Version Control with Subversion Mike Mason Easily in the bottom rung among all the Pragmatic Programmer
books I‘ve read till now. Extremely thin on content. Some might argue
that this book is for absolute beginners who are starting out with
version control, but they won‘t get far with this. A better alternative
is Version Control with Subversion.
Pragmatic Project Automation - Mike Clark – This book lists out tools and practices (Ant, Junit, scripting tools)
that make life easier on a development team. But there is nothing here
that somebody who‘s worked on a team that has practices like, for
example, continuous integration, would not know.
From the above experiences, I do check out any PragProg
book carefully before buying it. There are some extremely good ones,
and extremely bad ones.
Programming Collective Intelligence - Toby Segaran – I am still reading this, on and off, inspite of having bought it
almost a year back. The main reason is I wanted to work on the code as
I read along. This is the book if you want to know the principles
behind recommendation engines like Amazon‘s, basics of machine learning
and how the colossal amounts of user generated data on websites can
help generate new patterns and drive predictive programs.
Ship It! - Jared Richardson & William Gwaltney – Another Pragmatic Programmer book. The thing about the ones that I
have read so far is that they are usually thin and very basic. This
approach, IMO, is good only for non-coding subjects, like this one.
Ship It! does a good job of briefly summarizing the collective wisdom
of people who have actually been in the trenches. A nice handbook of
things to keep in mind if you are part of a development team – it has
specific advice for coders, team leads and managers.
The Art of Agile Development - James Shore & Shane Warden – A comprehensive collection of Agile practices like XP. The authors do
a great job of illustrating the principles behind agile concepts and
how to introduce them into a team. At various points they ackowledge
the fact that not all principles may be applicable to all teams, and
suggests how to modify them to suit specific needs. This, I believe, is
one of the strongest points of the book – describing how to do things
without being dogmatic in any way.
Building Scalable Web Sites - Cal Henderson – A book you can dip in into anytime and pick up nuggets of good
advice. From my very limited experience in working with high traffic
web apps I would not attempt to judge this book – but I feel it could
have been more comprehensive.
High Performance Web Sites Steve Souders This book is the YSlow documentation. You can also find the same things (and more) in Steve Souder's lectures at Stanford.
Data Crunching Solving everyday problems using Java, Python and More Greg Wilson.
As it usually happens I buy a lot of books (technical and
otherwise) and don‘t get around to reading them all alt=title=":)" />. These are the
ones I bought in 2008 and have lined up for this year (more to come) -
Securing Ajax Applications – Christopher Wells
The Productive Programmer – Neal Ford
Beautiful Code
Working Effectively with Legacy Code – Michael Feathers
Inside the Java Virtual Machine – Bill Venners- Prefactoring - Ken Pugh
Algorithms – Cormen and Rivest
