The developer book club

Today I interviewed Robert Nyman who is a technical evangelist for Mozilla and has been a front end developer since the days of DHTML.

Download .mp3 or .ogg (15 minutes/13mb).

Robert’s books

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide – this was the book that every front end coder had to own. This book explains javascript and it’s APIs in all their glory and helps you navigate the murky waters of cross browser compatibility.

JavaScript Objects – a book about working with objects in Javascript code from before anyone knew Javascript was the beautiful little language that it is.

Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference – dynamic HTML might sound a little bit quaint these days, but it was people pushing the boundaries of what you could do with Javascript and CSS that lead to the magic that happens in browsers today.

Today’s interview is with Barry Dorrans. Barry works at Microsoft for their internal security tools team, is author of a book called Beginning ASP.NET Security, used to be a security MVP and is known and loved in the UK .NET community.

Download .mp3 or .ogg (15 minutes/13mb).

Barry’s books

Code Complete – practical advice on all aspects of being a developer from how to write maintainable code to how to get on with other developers. Famous to me because it is the book that Jeff Atwood got his coding horror logo from.

Writing Secure Code – a good overview of common security vulnerabilities and what you can do about them with a particular focus on the windows platform.

Enough Rope to Shoot Yourself in the Foot: 40 Rules for C++ and C Programming (Unix/C) – the book that taught young Barry that development is hard. It talks about program style in C and C++ and shows common problems and how to avoid them.

This time I’ve interviewed Ian Cooper.

Ian has over 20 years of experience delivering Microsoft platform solutions in government, healthcare, and finance. During that time he has worked for the DTI, Reuters, Sungard, Misys, Beazley, and Huddle delivering everything from bespoke enterprise solutions, ‘shrink-wrapped’ products, and cloud services to thousands of customers. Ian is a passionate exponent of Software Craftsmanship and Agile. When he is not writing code he is also the and founder of the London .NET user group.

Download .mp3 or .ogg (18 minutes/17mb).

Ian’s books

Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices – practical advice on how to keep your code well structured, clean and easy to maintain aimed at developers doing development in an agile team.

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture – a book of established patterns for solving common problems in large scale software. Contains a reference of different patterns and in depth explanation of when the different patterns should and shouldn’t be used.

Domain-driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software – all about domain modelling and how to do it. When you should do domain modelling and when you shouldn’t.

Related links

Clean Code – a manifesto on the importance of the craftmanship needed to create code that is easy to understand and maintain. Focuses heavily on techniques like good naming, small methods and classes with only a single responsibility.

Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions – all about how applications talk to each other. A great companion to Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.

Today I’ll be interviewing Dan Wagner-Hall who is a .NET web developer for Red Gate, Selenium contributor and soon to be joining Google’s automated testing team.

Download .mp3 or .ogg (12 minutes/15mb).

Dan’s books

The New Turing Omnibus – a sampler of 66 important computer science concepts written for people who don’t have a background in computer science. Covers interesting and useful concepts from algorithms to stack based assembly code.

Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests – a book for developers who have mastered the basics of TDD but are looking for some help to answer the big questions about how to make it work in a large system.

Clean Code – a manifesto on the importance of the craftmanship needed to create code that is easy to understand and maintain. Focuses heavily on techniques like good naming, small methods and classes with only a single responsibility.

Related links

Uncle Bob’s Øredev 2008 talk

So who would have imagined it, but Anne Robinson started hosting a TV show that I actually like called my life in books. Instead of terrorizing dodgy builders or the guy on my team who went on the weakest link she talks to generally interesting people about books that influenced them through their lives (desert island disks for books).

I thought it might be a nice idea for a blog post on my own technical blog but when I mentioned it at work, one of the Daves said “so who would you talk to?”. Great idea! So I’m going to see if I can find interesting developers and get them to tell me their story about three technical books that influenced or inspired them.