This is a very short book on a great practice for any agile team. The book walk you through a lot of techniques an exercises that will help you and your team to have successful retrospectives. The first 3 chapters provide information on what retrospectives are about. How to create one for your team and what you need to learn to lead them. The next 5 chapters provide techniques that will help you to go through the different stages of the retrospective. Each technique is clearly explained, with step by step guides and diagrams (when necessary) to provide more information. In some cases, when some techniques are complimentary, this is clearly indicated. The authors also provide guidance on the scope where to apply the activities and a time estimate. The previous to last chapter talk briefly about release retrospectives and the last one give some pointers in how to act on the actions, resolutions and experiments the team agree to follow. If you work as a team lead in an agile team and you are in charge of facilitating the retrospectives, this book is a good tool to have.
Some time ago I wrote a first impressions about ASP.NET MVC in Action from Manning. It was after downloading an reading a few chapters available via the Manning early access program (MEAP). The book was written by Jeffrey Palermo, Ben Scheirman and Jimmy Bogard. A month ago or so I finally got my print copy and I started reading it right away. Let me put it simple, this book is fantastic. If you are planning to do any development with the framework you need to have it in your book shelves. The content span over just 352 pages and it covers pretty much every single aspect of the framework. It follows a very clear path explaining how the pieces fit together. I think that It can be useful for both the experienced and the novice programmer. One of the remarkable aspects of the book is the constant focus on testability and customization of the different pieces of the framework to help you reduce friction and improve the design of your application. I also felt that the authors took a very pragmatic approach while exposing users to different options on implementing web applications with the framework. I can see the book as having 3 parts. The first 6 chapters explain and show how to use and extend the framework. Chapters 7 to 10, explore more complex scenarios, like complex sites, use of AJAX, how to leverage existing asp.net features and hosting/deploying your final app. The last part is a compendium of Best practices, Recipes and an study or other two MVC frameworks, Monorails and Ruby on Rails.
The tag line of the book is refactor your wetware, and after reading it, you will. Andy Hunt explores how the brain works and try to point us (the readers) into ways to improve our use of it. For me the first five parts; Introduction, Journey from novice to expert, This is your brain, Get in your right mind and Debug your brain; is where I found the book most useful. This is not to say that the last four parts weren’t interesting, but for whatever the reason I took some effort on my part to concentrate and finish them. The book had several a-ha moments. The Dreyfus model was specially interesting and the idea of carry around a pad to write any idea you may have has serve me well so far. (Note: My journalism teachers all insisted that we always carry a pad to take notes and make observations, but I never extended the practice as a developer.) If you are into continuous improvement this is a book that you should read. I’m sure you will find some or all of it useful.
Last week I was reading Alistair’s post about the Toronto Code Retreat. I was planning to attend but I had plane tickets for the same day so I miss the opportunity, what I regret. In that post Alistair refers to the book The Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler. Next you know, I was ordering the book from Amazon. On Saturday I pick it up from the post office and next day I was sitting in the backyard going through the pages while preparing a BBQ. The book reads fast. Its divided in Five sections and each section consist of a series of very short chapters that, most of the time, are no more than two or three pages . I found that I’m doing a lot of the things that Chad recommends and I identify myself with some of the situations he mentions in the book. I particularly enjoyed the section about marketing yourself something I’m not good at doing. There are a few chapters that I market down to re-read later on, not because they are so deep that need a re-write, but mostly because are the ones that talk to my weakness and the stuff that I need to remind myself to work on to improve. Sparkled along the book there are easies from some renowned programmers on how they build their careers. They make for an enjoyable and fun read, and provide a break from the more “to the point” writing that Chad uses. All in all a very enjoyable book that can provide some help on achieving exactly what the tag line for the book is “creating a remarkable career in software development”.
- Common List E-book (free online)
- OpenDBDiff
- The latest release was a month ago and is looking really good. I plan to give it a try later this week or next week.
- Ioke
- Now runs on the CLR. Ola Bini has also a few posts about writing the implementation in C# and F#. Ioke is a very interesting young language and Ola have been posting about the decision made and the though process behind the design of it.
- NRegex and Ioke.Math
- As a side effect of implementing Ioke on the CLR, Ola Bini created NRegex. According to the author NRegex is: "a perl5.6 compatible regular expression engine. It supports named groups, is thread safe, supports look ahead and look behind, and is compliant with level 1 of Unicode Regular Expression Guidelines.” Thanks, Ola. To download NRegex just download Ioke and you will find the NRegex.dll in the bin folder or get the source code from the Git repository.
- Bini also implemented BigNumbers and other nice types in the Ioke.Math library. “One thing that really surprised me about .NET was that there is still no support for arbitrary precision math - neither big nums nor big decimals. I ended up implementing that myself, so now there is at least one open source library with liberal license that people can use.”
I got the book NHibernate in Action a few months ago via the MEAP program. Finally I was able to put my hands in the print version a few weeks ago. I have been reading it mostly in the subway during my commute. I’m very excited about it. I think the book is a must if you are using NHibernate or if you plan on using it in the future. It’s very well written. Most topics are explained in clear terms, with enough details to be relevant not just in the common usages but also in more complex scenarios. One of the things I like is that best and common practices are emphasized. The book covers version 1.2 and even when today you should probably use version 2.0 the book is still relevant. Ok, back to the book now.
I enjoyed this chapters as well, specially chapter 6 and 7 about extending the framework and preparing your site so it scale. Some of the code examples are using a previous (old) version of the framework. I hope they will be updated for the print version. I will like to see examples on using the MvcContrib code whenever is mentioned.
I got a copy of the MEAP edition for ASP.NET MVC in Action. This is the book on the (new?) ASP.NET MVC framework written by Jeffrey Palermo, Ben Scheirman, and Jimmy Bogard. I have been looking forward to both the final release of the framework and the book. Palermo has been very involved in the MvcContrib project as well, and all the authors have been posting about the framework since the early releases. Yesterday I went over the first four chapters. So far so good. As always with any book, depending on the level of your knowledge in the subject, there are things that you could like to be deal with more in depth and other stuff that since you can skip over. The really good points for me is that they put some emphasis in working with an architecture that will scale in a complex web site. Even when the code examples may be based on a simple model, they don’t treat them as trivial and the focus put on showing the testing is very good. Specially this last few days (week) with the controversy created about SOLID principles and Tests is nice to see that a book about a framework that should allow us to improve our coding of .net applications is paying special attention to this details. I will keep reading and waiting for updates on the book, I’m specially high on my expectations for Chapter 13 - IronRuby, IronPython, and the DLR, that is not available yet.
Methods and Tools its a free online magazine, download as pdf, the winter issue has a very good article about BDDD (Behavior Driven Database Development) and the value of Test. They edit four numbers a year and you can have all the issues on the website since 1999.
A month ago or so I found a mention to the Toronto Patterns Study Interest Group in the Toronto XP list. I made contact with them and I was reading the Clean Code book in no time. I have ben to two meetings so far and I can't be any happier. We are reading Clean Code by Robert Martin, a book that I had sitting in my library for a while. I really like the book and I mostly agree with all the concepts so far (we deal with the first five or six chapters so far). But I think that what I like the most is the interaction and how eterogeneous the group is. There are programmers that do Java, .Net, Python, C, C++, Ruby? on their day jobs, and this bring different perspectives. At the same time is fun to find that we all face the same issues with the code we have to deal with. It's nice as well to listen to those that disagree with my point of view or the author point of view and why. This make you, to further question your asumptions and the book as well. I did something similar a few months ago with my team, we all set up to read the Foundations of Programming ebook and them we discuss it during our weekly learning meating. Having to explain why you think that the author is right or wrong is a good exercise to fully understand the problem. Latelly at work I have been dealing with a piece of code that is not fun to work with (it's actually a real pain), so this meetings and this discussions help me to keep my morale high.
Douglas Crockford is well known from his work on javascript, specially from tools like Jslint and Jsmin. He is working at Yahoo as a JavaScript Architect.He is somehow responsible for the architecture of the YUI library. He is also the creator? of JSON, Javascript Object Notation and one of the best ways to pass data when using AJAX. He gave a talk in 2007 at Yahoo that is available in the Yahoo developer network about The good parts of Javascript. Six or seven months ago I watched the video with my team and everybody love it. We do quiet a lot of Javascript and we are using more and more AJAX to drive and improve the user experience of our sites. We rapidly adapted most of the patterns and recommendations from Crockford in the re write of our extensive JavaScript library. Imagine my excitement when I saw a few months ago that O'reilly announced a book by Douglas Crockford entitled, Javascript, the good parts. I look at the table of contents and I knew that I have to have it. I ordered two copies right away, one from my team and one for my personal library. The book came two weeks ago and I'm loving it. It's a short book (170 pages) with just content, full of code examples, not just how to do stuff but also how not to do things. I really appreciate this because sometimes is easier to see the problem looking at code that smells. I certainly recommend that if you do any web UI development at all, read this book. I will recommend it to everybody, not matter how knowledgeable you are on the language. I'm embedding the video below, if you want to see more from Crockford visit the YUI theatre.
If you are learning Ruby or if you just wander what is all of that about there are a few free online books that you should jump into. Mr. Neighborly's Humble Little Ruby Book is a free e-book from the guys of http://infoq.com you just need to create an account log in and download the pdf, if you like the book you can purchase it for just $9.95. The book is written in an easy to follow language (sometimes a little too campy for my taste) but is clear and you can get started on Ruby right away. It goes throught all the language constructs, objects, etc. It even have a chapter on sockets, http and web services.
I found this a nice book to start your journey into Ruby land. Another one that have been available for a while now is The little Book Of Ruby brought to you by the nice people that makes Ruby in Steel the Ruby editor for Visual Studio (It comes with some code available for download). Both books have a lot in common but some sections are complementary so (being both free) go crazy and download them! You don't need to learn Ruby first before start playing around with Rails but I found it handy to at least take a quick overview to the common objects/types like string, numbers and Collections before Riding the Rails. For Rails one of the best once from my point of view is Agile Web Development with Rails from The Pragmatic Programmers. Clear, right to the point and It also comes with code for downloads (specially handy when you don't want to start dealing with writing the css files while learning a new program and framework).
The book is using the Rails command line methods to generate all the boiler plate code but you can easily use NetBeans, the aforementioned Ruby in Steel or RadRails. With the new DLR coming fast and steady and the development of IronRuby improving, you should seriously consider learning this really elegant language even if you don't think on leaving the .NET arena.
I really like the Hacks series form O'Reilly, these are very simple references books. They present a problem and a solution in the form of quick articles and they are usually based on common issues for that technology. This book in the series presents 80 different hacks or techniques to create AJAX driven web sites. From simple stuff like a basic cross browser XHR library to more complex stuff like mash-ups, use of Prototype, Rico and Direct Remoting. The code examples are good but I found that some of them are not really ready to copy and paste into your application and you should look into them as starting points. For example in some demos using Prototype the make use of both the $() function and the DOM equivalent document.getElementById(), I could like to see some consistency in there. Besides that, the book is really good and you will find yourself flipping through its pages while putting together your next AJAX application.
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