Quite a while ago when I started doing Windows Phone 7 development I was looking for a good book to start with and I bought the Beginning Windows Phone 7 Development book written by Henry Lee and Eugene Chuvyrov. This turned out to be a very good choice, the book covers the most important parts of Windows Phone 7 development, filled with good code examples and is well written.

The book consists of two parts, 19 chapters and 458 pages.

Part 1: The Essentials of Windows Phone 7 Application Development

• Introducing Windows Phone 7 and the Windows Phone Platform
• Building Windows Phone 7 Applications
• Using Cloud Services As Data Stores
• Catching and Debugging Errors
• Packaging, Publishing and Managing Applications

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I have just completed reading the book 97 things every programmer should know – Collective wisdom from the experts. In this book Kevlin Henney has collected 97 tips from a wide range of well known experts.

Each of the 97 tips are straightforward and only two pages long, this gives you just enough information to get the concept.

The book is easy and fun to read and I also find the book useful and educational. There were several tips in the book that wake my interest and I will for sure look deeper into the subjects.

Some of the 97 tips you find in the book: Continue reading »

I have now completed reading the “Succeeding With Agile – Software Development Using Scrum” book written by Mike Cohn. In this book Mike Cohn is walking you through the world of Scrum step by step. Each parts and chapters in the book are addressing important subjects when using Scrum in software development. Each chapter contains one or several “Things to try now” sections. This way you are encouraged to stop and actually try what you are reading about in your own organization or projects. I really liked these sections, although I didn’t try them all they made me stop and think for a moment before continue reading.

The book is well written with a lot of real life examples and the graphs and images makes reading the book even more enjoyable. The book consists of five parts, 22 chapters and 475 pages. One thing that struck me while reading the book was that I was amazed by all the numbers and facts Mike Cohn had gathered for this book, must have spent a large amount of time just researching and collecting facts for the book.

Part 1 – Getting Started

• Why becoming agile is hard (but worth it)
• ADAPTing to Scrum
• Patterns for adopting Scrum
• Iterating toward agility
• Your first projects

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I have just completed reading Agile Principles, Patterns and Practices in C# by Robert C. Martin and Micah Martin. I learned a lot while reading this book, particularly about patterns. This book contains a lot of information with its’ 38 chapters and 700 pages, but it is written in a easy to read language and have plenty of figures and code examples. I think that everyone involved in software development will benefit from reading this book, particularly developers and solution architects.

Section 1 in this book focuses on agile development covering practices, Extreme programming, planning, testing, refactoring and a case study.

Section 2 is about agile design with principles and UML diagrams. Principles taught: The Single Responsibility Principle, The Open/Closed Principle, The Liskov Substitution Principle, The Dependency-Inversion Principle and the Interface Segregation Principle.

Section 3 is a case study where patterns are taught through a Payroll case. Patterns: Command, Template method, Strategy, Facade, Mediator, Singleton, Monostate and Null Object. This section also explains how create simple use cases from user stories, find underlying abstractions and implement the use cases.

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I just finished reading The art of unit testing by Roy Osherove and I find this book a must have or at least a must read book for everyone interested or involved in unit testing. The author, Roy Osherove, is the chief architect at Typemock and he is by many considered to be one of the lead resources in the world when it comes to unit testing.

This book is suitable for both unit testing “first timers” and persons that are more experienced within the field of unit testing.

Part 1 (chapter 1 and 2) of the book introduces you to the world of unit testing and how to get started.

Part 2 (chapter 3, 4 and 5) focuses on stubs, mock objects and isolation frameworks.

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After participating in a project with focus on architecture, patterns and clean code I got a revelation: Clean code principles should be used in every software development project. I also started feeling that using clean code principles is not only a good tool but it’s a matter of taking pride in what you do. Who wants to deliver code that is unstructured and hard to read and understand?

During this project I also read a very good book about clean code: Clean Code – A Handbook of Agile Software Craftmanship, written by Robert C. Martin

This book starts with the basics; code formatting and using meaningful names, and continues with unit testing and concurrency.

The book is written with Java programming language in mind but the content can easily be adapted to other programming languages.

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