My 2011 Software Development Reading List

A wonderful 2011 for all!  I’ve not made many New Year resolutions, but one resolution that I do want to try and keep is to work through my library of ever growing IT books that have been gathering some dust on my desk and hard-drive.  In stead of spending time reading through blogs, I want to rather concentrate on broadening/sharpening my skills through working through some of my books.  I’ve got quite a few good books where I’ve only read some part of the book and I also want to complete these as well.  So without further ado, here is my list of IT books for 2011 that I want to read:

1. [Partially Read] Release It!: Michael T. Nygard  - Excellent advise on getting and keeping your software running in production.
2. [Partially Read] Architecting Applications for the Enterprise: Dino Esposito, Andrea Saltarello – A great resource for all budding architects and a book that I want to re-read to evaluate our current architecture against some of the best practices mentioned in here.
3. [Partially Read] Continuous Delivery: Jez Humble, David Farley – Excellent advise on using build, test and deployment automation to manage your software releases.  We’ve got quite a good deployment environment at work as I’m a big fan of continuous integration, but it is always nice to read some further insights from experts to see what areas we can still improve on.
4. The Art of Application Performance Monitoring: Ian Molyneaux – Performance monitoring is high on the agenda for our Enterprise Asset Management System (EAMS).
5. Algorithms In A Nutshell: George Heineman, Gary Pollice & Stanley Selkow – Time to learn and brush up on the Graph, Search, Path finding and Network Flow algorithms.  I’ve got a sneaky suspicion that we are missing out on some opportunities to use better algorithms within our EAMS.
6. Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Andy Hunt – Time to figure out the best way to think about solving problems.
7. Growing Software – Proven Strategies for Managing Software Engineers: Louis Testa
8. Programming Ruby 1.9 (3rd Edition): Dave Thomas – Lots of people are raving about Ruby and I want to start learning why.
9. The Ruby Programming Language: David Flanagan & Yukihiro Masumoto

Happy reading :-)