Books

Here’s a list of books that had quite an influence on my professional life as software creator/engineer, or shared my view on how software should be created:

The book Clean Code describes precily how I feel code should look like and how software should be created. I believe for any company that creates software, creating good code is essential.

What is software architecture? Is enterprise architecture non-sense and does software architecture actually makes sense. Lean Architecture has a good view what software architecture is, and how it relates to business and more importantly goals people want to achieve software.

How does one run a software project? Should one speak of projects at all? How do you let a group of people create usable software that has the most value and the lowest cost? This books has very good ideas on that. A must for every project manager, or anyone involved in IT.

When I started programming in Java, J2EE and EJB’s where the recommended way to create enterprise software. I never understood why something simple as connecting and creating to a backend, using a database or creating reusable components had to be so complicated and cumbersome. But if so many people are doing it that must be right, so I thought, I guess I have to learn it some day. Fortunately, before I started investigating into EJB’s I found out about Spring! On a Spring course I got (I think) the book of Rod Johnson. Never read the book entirely, I learned most on Spring by trying out and looking at other people’s code. I’ll list another book by Manning which is more up to date.

I once started programming in Basic, but my professional programming career started in programming Java and (little bit) PHP. At my University I got courses on functional programming, in Haskell as well. The advanced typing system was very impressive. Many times, when my program actually compiled the program was doing what I expected it to do! Compare that to Java when you usually have to debug and tweak quite some time to get your program running good. Creating UI’s in Haskell is quite cumbersome however, and you won’t find many companies where Haskell is the standard language.
I was quite delighted to find out about Scala. Scala combines functional programming as well as object-oriented procedural programming. I’ve bought the book written by the creator of Scala, Martin Odersky. I can greatly recommend the book. The book is meant to be read fully from beginning to end, instead of as a reference. Which is a good thing, because I thing reference books are quite useless since the existence of search engines. The book is well written, contains a lot of examples as well as background information and kept me captivated during commuting (by train, not by car by the way).