Books I have read lately.

[Derek Smyth]

Hey folks,

Just thought I'd do a post on some books I've read lately and what I
thought of them.

Before that though just like to appologise for not attending the talk
this month on refactoring.

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Continous Integration - Paul M. Duvall - Addison Wesley

This book is required reading if your looking to introduce, or are
using, CI to automate your development builds. It's such a good, and
reasonably short, book!! Contains a number of guidlines on how CI
works and covers to a degree the tools available to get CI working,
although it covers Java and .NET so it's not a user manual for the
tools but a great starting place.

A very good book.

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Code Complete - Steve McConnell - MSPress

This book is HUGE!!! Haven't even came close to finishing it. It's
basically everything you need to know about developing software...
everything! .... from how to format the layout of your code to how to
write an if statement. Think you know how to write an if statement?
think again. It's huge but its a great book to have. Well written.

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Beginning Ruby From Novice to Professional - Peter Cooper - Apress

If you approaching Ruby fresh then this book is ok but it won't turn
you into a professional Ruby developer. It covers the basics well
enough to get you comfortable reading other material on Ruby. It's a
good book to have no doubt but once you grasp the basics of Ruby you
will need additional books to take you to the next level, should have
been called Beginning Ruby From Novice to Adequately Confident to Read
More.



The Ruby Way: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming - Hal
Fulton - Addison Wesley

This is the book that you should read to get to the next level. It's
like a recipe book split into chapters covering common tasks. There is
a chapter on working with strings, one for IO/Data Storage and so on.
Covers some gems that are avaliable for doing common tasks.

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Real World Functional Programming - Petricek - Manning

This books is available on mannings MEAP programme. It's not finished
and still needs a bit of work but if you interested in functional
programming with F# or C# then this will be a good book to own.
Believe it ot not I've learned a lot more about LINQ from this book
than any LINQ specific book, also helped me understand parts of Ruby.

Also if you want to create highly threaded applications, using PLINQ
for example, then understanding functional programming is a must. I've
found myself, thanks to this book and other F# books, writing some
very powerful functionality with very little code. (Turned a 9 minute
process into a 8 second process because of this book, but remember it
is not finished.)

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There are a few others including The Art of Unit Testing and Test
Driven that I am currently reading at the moment and are also very
good and I would recommend.