Programming Pearls, 2nd Edition, John Bently
Where Bently excels is by demonstrating how a problem can be thought through and analysed. The "Back of the envelope" chapter describes how to estimate the volume of water which flows down the Mississippi river. This is a master class in lateral thinking.
A theme that runs through the examples is the creation of test harnesses to prove that the program being developed works. It is refreshing to see automated testing being focused on in a book which by computing standards is now considered a classic.
The Mythical Man Month and Other Essays on Software Engineering, Frederick Brooks
This is a great read for anyone who works as a developer as Brooks’ experiences with punch cards and rooms full of documentation for one system are relevant now.
This is an essential read though for any manager of a business who employs software developers within their company.
Refactoring, Martin Fowler
Using a series of refactorings Martin Fowler shows how the design and quality of a code base can be improved by making many small changes. Changes which alter the code but not the behaviour of the system. This is made possible by having a good collection of tests that assert how the code being changed behaves.
This is a book which I return to often. It is a book which has had a profound impact on software development. Most of the patterns described are now built in to development tools like ReSharper and CodeRush.
Agile Web Development with Rails 1.2, Dave Thomas
This is the book I am currently reading as I am creating a Rails app in my spare time. It is woefully out of date as Rails is now at version 3 (with 3.1 soon to be finalised). So I read all the examples wondering what has changed.
Design Patterns, Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissidies
Most of the code examples are in C++ and a few are in SmallTalk and whilst I only have distant memories of C++, I found the code examples interesting and readable.
Some of the patterns in this book are now considered anti-patterns (Singleton and maybe Template method) but most are well worth understanding. What these patterns also provide is a vocabulary for developers to use when discussing code. Often a solution to a problem can be articulated by citing one of these patterns.
JavaScript: The Good Parts, Douglas Crockford
Douglas Crockford believes that some parts of the languages are great, some are bad and the rest are just ugly. Most of the book is spent explaining how the good parts can be used to form an expressive and flexible language. The remainder highlights the bad and the ugly which, if avoided, make the good parts even better.
This book is so rich in content and so terse that I read it three times. I now understand the power of closures in JavaScript and how best to construct objects which are secure and extensible.
Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, Martin Fowler
Once again I am impressed by the way that Martin Fowler manages to formalise patterns in software engineering and the impact that he has on the frameworks that I use. I read this book soon after using NHibernate the .Net Object Relational Mapping tool and it felt like I was reading the specification for NHibernate. The same is true for Active Record in Ruby on Rails, and many of the Model View Controller (MVC) frameworks that exist. I must add that I do not think that Martin Fowler was the first to discover these patterns. For example Trygve Reenskaug created the MVC pattern while working at Xerox Parc. But what Martin Fowler has is the ability to collate and present the patterns so they become accessible and readable to all. He also draws upon the experience of many so the pattern is applicable to the time.
The Little Schemer, 4th Edition, Friedman and Felleisen
Scheme is a dialect of LISP so it is a language where all data structures are lists and functions are also data. The Little Schemer builds up through its narrative “Ten Commandments” for writing idiomatic and valid Scheme programs. At first this is easy to follow as the recursion is shallow and mainly focused upon creating functions and safely processing the lists. The later chapters are much harder as the recursion gets deeper and functions start generating functions. This builds to the final masterpiece, the applicative-order Y combinator.
I enjoyed this book. It was challenging, more challenging than Dante’s the Divine Comedy. However, it opened my mind to a world of functional programming that I am just starting to explore. I will be downloading a Scheme at some point so I can work through the code and further my understanding.
Domain Specific Languages, Martin Fowler
This book is a small study on computer language design. It covers; lexing, syntactic analysis, the specification of grammer using BNF and the role of Abstract Syntax Trees to name but a few. As I have not previously studied language design or the writing of compilers, this was a great introduction to the topic.
For me the best chapters came towards the end. Here Martin Fowler presents some alternative models of computation. They are alternative because they are not imperative computation which is the most common. They relate to DSLs as they are often harder to configure and their operation can not be immediately understood through just reading the code. So DSLs are a very useful tool to simplify the programming of these programming models. Of the four presented I was especially interested in the “Decision Table” and the “Production Rules” models as both of these solve problems I often encounter at work.
Designing with web standards, Jeffery Zeldman
I am sure of one thing. That back in 2003, when Jeffery Zeldman published this book, I was not the only person making web sites this way. But we all soon stopped. I have read other books since which have helped me to understand more about the detail. But it is this book which changed my thinking on the topic.
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