Homepage Usability and other technical books

[Jonathan Aquino]

I'm interested to hear what software-related books people are reading. I recently finished "Mastering Regular Expressions". That took me a couple of months to get through, so my current book is a bit lighter: Jakob Nielsen's "Homepage Usability".

Nielsen criticizes the homepages of 50 websites. His dogmatic tone is a bit annoying, but I find myself agreeing with his recommendations. A pet peeve of his that I share is miscategorization and poor naming. Bad names may seem a minor fault, but they bite you later because bad names don't scale.

My next book will probably be Robert Martin's "Agile Software Development". I'd stopped about halfway – it's not the most exciting reading (compared to "The Pragmatic Programmer", for instance). But having read so many positive reviews of it, I'm hoping that it will teach me something new.

What programming-related books do you recommend?

[Devin Rose]

I also liked The Pragmatic Programmer, though I have not implemented as many of their guidelines as I should.

I am currently reading many Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) books, including "Essential WPF", "WPF Unleashed", and "Applications = Code + Markup". WPF is Microsoft's new way of doing UI and tying it to logic and is very powerful. They have created a system where almost everything is customizable, allowing you to plug-in at any level and override what you want, and yet they also provide a whole tree of standard controls that give you much behavior for free.

I also have been learning Javascript with the O'Reilly "definitive" guide (aka the Rhino book). It has been excellent so far, though with Microsoft's Silverlight, I may be able to just program C# on the web!

The programming world is in a really exciting place right now, on the cusp of the convergence of the web and desktop; which technologies will win and become the standard?

[Jonathan Aquino]

Hm! I'll need to check out WPF, if only to see the interesting ideas therein.

I recently slogged through JavaScript: The Definitive Guide. It took me a long time, but I'm glad I did it. Knowledge is good.

[Jonathan Aquino]

An entertaining and informative (albeit long) take on "the next Java".

"Code's Worst Enemy" by Steve Yegge
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/codes-worst-enemy.html