Some books for agile programmers

I'm giving docs.google.com another try. I tried it over two years ago (wow, time flies) when Google Docs was still Writely. Oh, my prediction did come through (they got bought by Google), wuhu! So if this post gets doubly published it's because it got screwed up.

Update: docs.google.com didn't manage to publish the title properly. I also have to apply some tags manually. All the pictures and headings came through allright, though.

New books

I just got these books:

They're all from The Pragmatic Bookshelf, although I got them from Amazon (who sent them from New-Zealand, which gave me sort of a bad eco-concience for a while..) cause they were alot cheaper there.

The first title, The Pragmatic Programmer. Well, I'm sort of ashamed that I haven't read it before, being as famous as it is. However, I'm looking through the TOC, and I sort of get the feeling I've touched most of the points, either by hard realization and experience, or by advice from friends and colleagues. The book still provides me with a sturdy, well sorted and well formulated set of practices, which will help me communicate the QWAN to my consulted clients.

Practices of an Agile Developer looks like a follow-up to TPP. It's published in 2007, 7 years after. It seems to have more of a focus on collaboration and project management than on effective tool use (although the subjects do overlap).

The last book is written by two guys working for SAS, neither are part of the original PP pair. I got it because it's been a long while since I read any modern works on agile development, and agile stuff is quickly turning into my pressure point for some reasons yet to be announced publically :) The book also has a very nice looking section on Common problems and how to fix them. My team at work just shrunk down to 1,5 people, and we recently suffered almost a two month long sprint stumble (long story, and I'm still having trouble figuring out how I could've gotten it right). Hopefully the book has some advice I can apply to my own project.

All three books make up for three areas I care, and I think every IT-professional should care deeply about: Tools, languages and practices.

I just asked on twitter which book I should read first. I think I'll do Ship it! first, but might follow the advice of Olve and do TPP first. To be honest, after I finished studying I've been horrible at reading books. I have several books now that I started but never finished.

Oh, here's a wordle of my blog:

Very flash. I can't for the life of me remember who's blog I just read who pointed me at it. Sorry. There are a bit too many normal English words in the cloud, but some of the words are nice: pretty, people, good, stuff :)

Ok, let's push this thing to Blogger and see how it goes..

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