Hey I still have a few of the Turbo Pascal manuals in Ziplocs along with Ultima maps that I had Lord British sign while in Austin. My most trashed book through use of all times is the first edition of Programming Perl.
That much said, my favorites: 1. Refactoring - Fowler, I had the book for a while but I lucked out and happened to be visiting a research team at Purdue, the same day Martin Fowler was giving a presentation and it finally clicked that it is like database schema normalization, almost a brainless activity that gives you the confidence that you don't have to have big upfront design 2. Domain Driven Design - Evans - signed up for Eric's reading circle at OOPSLA for the book's release, that book combined with OOPSLA tribute to the Scandinavian School of Design made me realize that my 10 years of hardcore C++ and Smalltalk flirtations completely missed the point of the roots and promise of OO. 3. Design Patterns - again a couple years of skimming and shelfware until I met John Vlissides at IBM Research and he mentored me and supported my organization at IBM with his own time despite health issues - after getting into it, I grasped the importance of a ubiquitous language among developers for discussing designs with all their assumptions and tradeoffs 4. UNIX Network Programming, Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment - Stevens - I probably copied almost all of the code from these books in real-life projects at some point, for later editions of the former I had the pleasure of helping Richard verify his samples on AIX 5. Effective Java - Bloch - came at a point of my career that I was getting overconfident, huge kick in the pants to keep on learning, it is so well written 6. About Face [3] - Cooper - first book that got me into interaction design and that usability is not voodoo 7. Innovator's Dilemma/Innovator's Solution (just pick up second, as it has enough of the first included)- Christenson - a business book but important for developers with any product management responsibility - why traditional good management practices doom companies over time and how to gain competitive advantage through deliberate innovation - completely explained all my frustrations with IBM management early in my career Ron -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Seattle area Alt.Net" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/altnetseattle?hl=en.
