Comments on: Read books and earn more money

By: Kevin Taylor

Kevin Taylor — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 14:28:45 +0000

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the nice list of software books. Most of these would be on my own list.

One book not listed that is near the top of my personal list is “The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master.”

I’ve hired, led, and mentored many developers of varying levels of experience, The Pragmatic Programmer contains so many tips, guidelines, and words of wisdom on how to be an effective professional or craftsman in our field.

Thanks again!

By: ijrussell

ijrussell — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 21:49:40 +0000

Can I suggest two other books:

Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns by Jimmy Nilsson.
The Art of Unit Testing by Roy Osherove.

You are fortunate that you live in an area where companies are willing to implement agile practices. I tried a dojo where I took the team through the refactoring towards SRP sample by Gabriel Schenker [Pablos Solid ebook] and they saw nothing wrong with the original code! They thought that having so many classes would make debugging more difficult! I tried to explain that by implementing unit testing during the process, they should never have to debug as the tests should cover all of the potential edge cases.

I did a presentation to a user group on Monday about Fluent Validation and stressed the built-in test helper methods. During the main session, by Seb Lambla, the group of forty were asked who was doing unit testing and five of us put up our hands; I have to say that I was quite shocked at how low that was.

By: Mark Dalgarno

Mark Dalgarno — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:15:16 +0000

Reading books and going to software talks / conferences are a great way of developing a broader view on what’s going on in the wider industry. When interviewing I always ask about how people keep up to date with new developments and these are two good ways of showing that you care about doing a good job.

I’d think about adding IEEE Software to your reading list. It has some useful stuff now and again.

By: Andy Palmer

Andy Palmer — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 22:01:08 +0000

All of those books are brilliant.
Agile Software Development: PPP is the book that got me into XP, and led directly to where I am now (thanks Uncle Bob )
I would strongly recommend that you get Perl Medic
Yes, it’s about Perl. And it also contains one of the best case studies of taking a reasonably complex legacy code base through getting under test and refactoring through to functional, maintainable code.