Is clean code able to teach you software craftmanship? Read my review to find out!

One of the benefits of working at Google that I hadn't heard about until I joined is that you're both actively plied with books when you start, and given annual credit to buy books of your choice (without the hassle of filing expenses).

SCEA second exam

Just over a week ago, I took the Sun Certified Web Component Developer (Java EE 5) exam. I’m going to share the positives and negatives of the experience so you can learn if you want to take then exam, and how to go about studying.

IWho comes up with this? A dummies for dummies book? In The Manga Guide to Databases, Tico the fairy teaches the Princess how to simplify her data management. We follow along as they design a relational database, understand the entity-relationship model, perform basic database operations

Here are 4 tools to help you sift through your Google Analytics data plus a free e-book „Analytics miniBible” to help you control your online business.

This is a collection of 4 programming brain teasers in C and Java. Some require a sudden flash of insight or knowledge of good coding style to solve, others demand intimate knowledge of the compilation process. The problems range from easy to insanely tricky. The C brain teasers come from The C Puzzle Book and the Obfuscated C Contest. The Java problems are from the Java Puzzlers book.

Stoyan Stefanov is a member of Yahoo’s Performance team; he’s worked on a variety of performance-related projects at Yahoo, including the popular YSlow plugin for Firebug. Stoyan’s latest project is Object Oriented JavaScript, a new book from Packt. Chapter 8, “Coding and Design Patterns.” is available as a free download.

We have just released the PDF, soft copy, eBook style books for the following three books on www.drp.co.za and www.saarchitect.net. On the later server find the books here and remember that www.drp.co.za is geared at American region and www.saarchitect.net for the MEA region.

Chapter 1 of The Art of Debugging with GDB, DDD, and Eclipse presents an overview of the debugging process and the role of debugging tools, and walks through an extended debugging example.

I've written a few posts recently about various books, and recently while interviewing a candidate for Nimble Software Professionals it occurred to me that for an experienced developer (e.g. not a new grad out of college), asking what their favorite (or most recently read) programming book is could tell a lot about them as a developer. If their favorite book is something like Expert Programming in 21 Hours (not a real title) that paints a very different picture than if their favorite book is Design Patterns or a similarly respected title.

The Pragmatic Programmers, known for its line of programming titles in print and PDF form, have decided to shelve production of a planned book called iPhone SDK Development. In a news item posted to its web site, the company cited the iPhone SDK's non-disclosure agreement as the reason the book could not be published and made available to the public.

F# for Scientists is a new book by British author Dr. Jon D. Harrop, who is the principal at Flying Frog Consultancy and a key player in the small-but-growing F# universe. I just finished reading it.

I recently took a Test-Driven-Development (TDD) training course and the teacher recommended that I read "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael Feathers. First things first, a note about the title. Feathers defines "Legacy Code" a bit different than you may expect, especially if you are not into the XP/Agile/TDD world. I have heard (and used) a number of definitions for "legacy code" over the years. Most of these definitions have to do with code that is old, inherited, difficult to maintain, or interfaces with other 'legacy' hardware/software. Feathers' definition is 'code without tests.' For those not into TDD this may seem odd, but in the TDD world, tests are what make code easy to maintain. When good unit tests are in place, then code can be changed at will and the tests will tell automatically you if you broke anything.

I am within a month or so of completing the third edition of my book. This book will always be available as a free PDF from my web site and as an instant-print book.

Douglas Crockford’s “JavaScript: The Good Parts” qualifies among the top 3 books on JavaScript ever written. Its concise, terse and full of gems, which you otherwise have to glean from the stacks of information out there on the web. Yahoo! also published a video, where Douglas Crockford speaks on the topic. Watch it now!

Since Spring has changed their maintenance policy, there is a lot of comment from the Open Source community (they feel betrayed.. personally I do as well).

It all started on this-year's JavaONE conference, when I met Vincent and Felipe. Then Vincent mentioned the idea of writing a new edition of the book, and including the new JUnit 4.5 features, so we all soon agreed. Stan joined us, and we signed the contracts in July. It is all set up now, and we even have the TOC and some sample chapters published on the Manning website.

Yet another list of recommended books that may strongly influence your mindset as a software developer - how they take effect on how you see the world of software development and act within it, influencing a good part of your decisions and overall thinking in your every day job.

It is simple to rate this book: everyone should own and read a copy! Yes, it's a Java tome, in a Java series; but it happened that as I was reading it, I was working on a UNIX shell script test harness (which, of course, is software, just like anything else) and thought I'd try to apply the lessons presented. My testing code was finished more quickly than I expected, was better designed than I had hoped, and was more elegant than I thought I could write, all because I applied the principles articulated herein. What's not to like? I can hardly wait to try it on Java code!

Learn about major new features in SQL Server 2008 including security, administration, and performance.

Sick of the “X# Design Websites That Web Designers Need To Follow!!11!!” and other web design articles? Here's a list of a few books that will help you become a better software engineer.

Like many of my fellow DCT Gurus, I have been writing software for many years and have learned some valuable lessons along the way. Fortunately technologists like Neal Ford, author of The Productive Programmer published by O'Reilly, have captured a great deal of sage advice for fellow programmers seeking additional enlightenment about their craft. Read on to learn how Neal's book compares to previous programming productivity books.

Peter and I have been working hard on Grails in Action, and we're tracking pretty well. We're nearly 200 pages in, and for a couple of amateur authors (and in my case, amateur Grails developer!), we're doing ok!

The Ultimate HTML Reference should be on the desk of each and every web developer and designer. You never again have to wonder whether a browser supports a specific element or attribute, just page to the element, check the browser support stats, read the "fine print" and carry on with the job at hand. Not sure what the most appropriate element is to mark up a specific part of your page? Simple, the book is organized by groups of relevant elements such as Structural Elements, List Elements, Text Formatting etc. Find the group of elements that suits your needs, find an element that looks to be the one you want to use and simply read the "Use this for..." description. This book is so easy to use, a pleasure to read and a definite must have.