David Grey's Blog

My Developer's Reading List

I'm a firm believer that a professional developer should also be a reader. You don't stop learning the day you walk out of college and any developer worth their salt will continue to learn through reading books on the subject of software development. I thought it about time that I posted my own personal list of favourite books. This isn't an exhaustive list, nor is it a list of all the books I've read (as my groaning bookshelves will testify), but this is my list of the best of the books that I think are best. These are certainly the books that I recommend my students and graduates read before they go out into the big wide world of software development as I think they give a very useful practical perspective.

Software Requirements, Karl Weigers, 2^nd edition, Microsoft Press, 2003. ISBN 0735618798

Code Complete, Steve McConnell, 2^nd edition, Microsoft Press, 2004. ISBN 0-7356-1967-0

Coder to Developer – Tools and Strategies for Delivering Your Software, Mike Gunderloy, Sybex, 2004. ISBN 0-7821-4327-X

Test-Driven Development in Microsoft .NET, James Newkirk and Alexei Vorontsov, Microsoft Press, 2004. ISBN 0-7356-1948-4

Design Patterns – Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson & John Vlissides, Addison-Wesley, 1995. ISBN 0-201-63361-2

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, Martin Fowler, Addison-Wesley, 2002, ISBN 0321127420

Refactoring – Improving the Design of Existing Code, Martin Fowler, Addison-Wesley, 1999. ISBN 0-201-48567-2

Writing Secure Code, Michael Howard and David LeBlanc, 2^nd edition, Microsoft Press, 2003. ISBN 0-7356-1722-8

Inside Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, Brian Johnson, Craig Skibo & Marc Young, Microsoft Press, 2003. ISBN 0-7356-1874-7

Dynamics of Software Development, Jim McCarthy, 2nd edition, Microsoft Press, 2006. ISBN 0735623198

Visual Studio Hacks: Turbocharging the IDE, James Avery, O'Reilly, 2005. ISBN 059610250X

I'm sure there are plenty more that could be added to this list; if anybody's got any recommendations I'd love to hear them. One day, I'll try to get round to annotating this list and describing why I think these books are so useful.

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David

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