Really great IT books
May 11th, 2005
I realise this has the potential to be a controversial topic since verybody has their favourites. These are the books I’ve read that have changed my outlook on development/architecture/programming languages etc. in a significant way. So in no particular order…
- Code Complete - Steve McConnell This is a really good book though I think I read it late since I already knew most of it, everybody should read this book.
- Hardcore Visual Basic - Bruce Mcinney You can’t claim to be a competent VB6 programmer unless you’ve read this and the Matt Curland book below.
- Advanced Visual Basic 6 - Matt Curland A book from the guy who wrote intellisense! What more can you say? A lot of this will go over your head when you read it but it’s a great book for getting to grips with VB’s internals.
- Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture - Martin Fowler A good book that descibes a lot of the common patterns you see in modern applications, well worth the read but the “Enterprise” in the title is a little mis-leading.
- Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming - Jeffrey Richter Covers the dos/donts and problems with the .NET framework in more detail than I have seen anywhere else. A must for any .NET coders
- Writing Secure Code - M Howard I know, I know a book on security from Microsoft. It’s actually a well written and interesting look at what you should and shouldn’t do. The first edition is a little C focused but still a great read
- Effective Java - Josh Bloch Every Java developer should read this book
- Effective C# - Bill Wagner Every C# developer should read this one
- Transact SQL Programming - Kevin Kine et al I learnt a large part of what I know about databases from this book. It’s rather out of date now so I really hope they do a second edition
- SQL Tuning - Dan Tow Dan describes an excellent and methodical method for analysing query plans
- Visual Basic Win 32 Api Quick Reference - Dan Appleman This is a weighty tome indeed but the only book you need if you have to use the Win32 API from VB
- Programming Perl - Larry Wall et al This comprehensive perl book should be on most developers shelves
- Transact SQL Cookbook - Ales Spetic In my opinion one of the more useful cookbook titles because so may people find it hard to think in SQL
- Design patterns : elements of reusable object-oriented software - Gamma et al Tedious but still the best book on patterns
Phew, that was a longer list than I was expecting. I’m sure I’ve missed a few but I’m not in front of my bookshelf at the moment. I’ll have to have a look when I get home.
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