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Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt

This is another book from Andy Hunt and the Pragmatic series. I can’t emphasize enough how great these books are.

Where as in Pragmatic Programming they discussed patterns and practices to improve your developer skills this book takes a step back and is looks at how your brain works. It’s a very interesting concept and one I suggest developers think more about.

The book as the title implies covered two areas:

The first part goes over the thought process and after reading this book I gained so much insight into how my brain is wired. Andy does a great job of explain how a brain processes thoughts and stores memories in terms of metaphors of computers and technology.

The second part covered the many techniques for learning and helps walk you though examples of the pros and cons of each method. Again this was very insightful as I have never really thought much about how I learn and what processes are best for me.

Thanks to this book I now have a few different options for learning that I plan to try to find the one that works best for me to retain and use knowledge.

Go pick up a copy and sit down. It was such a fascinating book and I ended up reading it from cover to cover in only a few days. Once you get into it, if you are anything like me you will be so enthralled you won’t be able to put it down.

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt, David Thomas

This is one of my new top developer books. Far be it for me to tell you want to read or not read but I feel this is a must read requirment for any developer.

The topics that are covered range from dealing with “code rot”, software that is outdated and breaking, to the importance of testing.

The beauty of this book is that it isn’t your standard technology book. You won’t read this and learn a new language, framework or tool. In the book they cover so many important topics that are about being a better developer in general. Many of these issues are ones that people never think about yet if they did could improve the quality of their software and the happiness of their clients.

I plan to share this book with all my coworkers and I hope once you read it you will do the same.

The Enterprise and Scrum by Ken Schwaber

On of my coworkers won this as a prize at the IndyTechFest. We were all very intrigued by the Kanban talk that was given there and so I wanted to learn more about using lean development techniques in business. I found that this book helped me understand more about scrum and how it can improve my development capabilities.

It’s a pretty quick read that you can do in a few nights at home but well worth it to learn more about lean.

Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005: The Storage Engine by Kalen Delaney

I read this book to gain some deep knowledge about how SQL Server 2005 works on the inside. My goal was to better understand how to install, configure and manage a SQL Server 2005 database. I learned a lot about tables and indexes and log files and how all if it works together and can be tweaked for better performance.

This is a must read for anyone that spends a lot of their day working with SQL Server 2005!