A shameless plug for my book "Spring Enterprise Recipes," from Apress. The book covers all manner of topics including business process management, batch processing, web services, messaging, schedulers, application integration, distributed computing and clustered caching. The book provides a discussion of all these techniques as well as prescriptions for Spring and various other libraries to build real-world, practical solutions. I hope you'll consider it for your next purchase.

Christmas approaches as does the end of the year, below are 5 great gifts you can get yourself. These are books that I have personally read, so they definitely are receiving my full recommendation – full of tips and great answers towards running a successful business and making money from what you love doing!

Dag König talks with Julia Lerman, the Entity Framwork guru and author of the book Programming Entity Framework.

Paul asked me to review this, his first book, and my comment to him was that he had a pretty high bar to match; being of the same "series" as Release It!, Mike Nygard's take on building software ready for production (and, in my repeatedly stated opinion, the most important-to-read book of the decade), Debug It! had some pretty impressive shoes to fill. Paul's comment was pretty predictable: "Thanks for keeping the pressure to a minimum."