Study Group book recommendations
I often recommend developers at my clients to form Book Study Groups. The efficiency of learning together can’t be valued enough.
Often I am asked to recommend a couple of books to read in this manner and all though there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to that, I have noticed that a few books are almost always on my lists.
I decided to post a list of recommendations on various topics at different skill levels. (Books specific to a particular programming language have been ignored and the list is sorted by book title.)
Agile Software Development with Scrum
by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle
Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great
by Esther Derby, Diana Larsen, and Ken Schwaber
Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
by Robert C. Martin
Crystal Clear: A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams
by Alistair Cockburn
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
by GoF
Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
by Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, John Brant, and William Opdyke
Implementation Patterns
by Kent Beck
The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
Practices of an Agile Developer: Working in the Real World
by Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt
Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
by Martin Fowler
Scrum and XP from the Trenches
by Henrik Kniberg
Test Driven Development: By Example
by Kent Beck
xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code
by Gerard Meszaros
Hope you’ll find something interesting!
(I should also hint that I will probably add The Productive Programmer by Neal Ford to this list soon. I haven’t read the complete book yet but it seems promising. You can check out a QCon presentation held by the author from last year at InfoQ.)