Small Little Reccomended Reading ListBy No Means Exhaustive

With a forecast of light blogging for this weekend this little list was prepared for your reading pleasure (the books not the list, mind you)

• Dreaming in Code - Scott Rosenberg
  This one is fairly new. Scott had the opportunity to walk along with the team around Mitch Kapor, trying to get their PIM implementation into version 1.0. The teams successes and tragedies are described in a way that is only possible if you are very close to the people. A central theme in the book is how hard it can be to turn your software dream into reality.
  


• Coder to Developer - Mike Gunderloy
  This one will take you by the hand and show, in a learning-by-example way, how to turn from a mere programmer into a developer with an understanding of not so much the language you program in, but the bigger picture around implementation of a product. The examples are .NET oriented, but knowledge in that domain is not really required.
  


• The Best Software Writing I - Joel Spolsky
  Some time ago Joel put together a list of software/dev related essays freely available on the web and wrapped it up in book-form. Reading addict as I am, almost all of them were already known to me, making this the only book not in my possession. If you don't know the list of people mentioned on the Amazon page, you really will gain insight reading these interesting pieces
  


• C# Cookbook - Jay Hilyard
  Wonderful book full of examples to get the little programming stuff done. It goes from XML handling, threading, file system interactions, to ways to handle unsafe code. The whole spectrum of things you normally run into are handled. If you have your requirements straight, and you think you know how you're going to implement them in code, this book can tell there might just be an easier way. Good one for code-reading if you are new to C#.
  


• Beautiful Code - Andy Oram and Greg Wilson
  Just in two week ago, read the first three chapters only. Chapter 1 is a contribution from Brian Kernighan on the beauty of some regexp matching code. This book contains lots and lots of code samples in multiple languages. For those who want to dig a little deeper and see what the great minds of our time think is great code.
  The 33(!) chapters in total are composed by an impressive list of people: next to Kernighan there's Karl Fogel, Jon Bentley, Tim Bray, Elliotte Rusty Harold, Michael Feathers, Alberto Savoia, Charles Petzold, Douglas Crockford, Henry S. Warren, Jr., Ashish Gulhati, Lincoln Stein, Jim Kent, Jack Dongarra and Piotr Luszczek, Adam Kolawa, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Diomidis Spinellis, Andrew Kuchling, ravis E. Oliphant, Ronald Mak, Rogerio Atem de Carvalho and Rafael Monnerat, Bryan Cantrill, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, Simon Peyton Jones, Kent Dybvig, William Otte and Douglas C. Schmidt, Andrew Patzer, Andreas Zeller, Yukihiro Matsumoto, Arun Mehta, TV Raman, Laura Wingerd and Christopher Seiwald and Brian Hayes. Admitted I only know a couple of them
  


• Peopleware - Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
  Classic book from the late eighties on how companies let their projects fail by by all making the same classical mistakes over and over again. Influential book that is on most Software Development reading lists
  


• Code Complete - Steve McConnell
  Of course this one should be at the top. The 'Bible' of Software Development. Cannot think of a book is more highly regarded in our field than this one. If you read this blog, chances are low that you don't know it, if you don't know the book and you *are* a developer, buy it now and start drinking in the wealth of knowledge that Steve McConnell provides!