Panasonic Youth rob sanheim writes about software, business, ruby, music, stuff and things

Five books every Java developer must own

Update: Welcome, Javalobby readers! You might be interested in the followup to this post. Thanks for the great feedback and suggestions.

Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David ThomasThis is absolutely required reading for any software developer, regardless of language. If you are lost when people are talking about “keeping it DRY” or [...]

Back to the daily grind

catching up after the Christmas break…

A missed opportunity for Barnes and Noble’s web site

I frequent barnes and nobles (and borders) in my town a lot. When I find a good book, I’m usually too impatient to wait the shipping delay to save the few dollars via amzon. Yet I only use amazon’s site for all my online book needs. Beyond the obvious advantages amazon has [...]

Amazon wishlists suck

With the holidays approaching, once again I struggle negotiating my amazon wishlist to figure out what books I really want for Christmas. There are so many things wrong with the usability of the wishlists that its hard to know where to start, but Marc has a good list going with some helpful feedback on [...]

How many books do you read a year?

My wife had a resolution for 2005 of “read 50 books”. With one month left she is about half way done. Even though she won’t make her resolution, I’m still pretty impressed with how much reading she is able to get done while balancing full time work and school. If I had [...]

Joel’s software managment reading list

Joel has posted a suggested reading list for his software management training program. Lots of classic software development titles and general business titles in his list.
I’ve only read five of the books, amazingly, with all the reading I do: The Mythical Man Month, Pragmatic Programmer, Microserfs, the New New Thing, and The Tipping [...]

more beta books on the way from Pragmatic Programmers

Its good to see that the Pragmatic Bookshelf is continuing with beta books for their future releases. The next two releases are Pragmatic Ajax and Enterprise Integration with Ruby, both of which sound very cool. I’m hoping the efforts to get information published quicker, in smaller chunks, and incrementally will continue and spread [...]

Behold! A link-post!

Wherein I link to various shiny things that caught my eye for the last four days, while I was not able to blog.

The Head First Design Patterns model is hot

If there is one thing Kathy Sierra and crew know how to do, its how to market their books. I guarantee their covers get a ton more attention then this, for instance. They are getting plenty of free advertising from bloggers, like me and Robert Watkins, for instance.
Anyways, I bought it for the [...]

Rails beta book and agile book publishing

Justin Gehtland blogs about getting the importance of getting the “last 20%” right when shipping a technical book - DHH’s and Dave Thomas’ approach with the beta Rails book is te best way to make sure and get that last 20 pefect before shipping. I agree completely and will go one step further - [...]