Our new books in July

A part of my job is being a librarian: I evaluate and buy new books for our company. Now that my monthly Amazon shipping arrived, I thought I’d use the inventory as a technology trend indicator ;-)

Here are the titles for this month:

Curtis, Keith: After the Software Wars: A former Microsofti programmer turned into an open-source / Linux follower. See Paul Thurrott’s interview of the author for a background.
Berardi, Nick; Katawazi, Al; Bellinaso, Marco: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Website Programming – Problem, Design, Solution: MVC is obviously a hot topic and incidentally something I’ve been working myself with a bit lately. I’ll probably get down to writing about it some day as well. I’m not sure if this is the hottest title on the subject given that I haven’t read it yet, but I can already recommend two other books on the subject.
Moggridge, Bill: Designing Interactions & Lawrence, Dave; Tavakol, Soheyla: Balanced Website Design: Optimising Aesthetics, Usability and Purpose: Although few customers are actually using design skills as purchasing criteria, more and more of them do value the skill. Technical superiority no longer suffices, and having users actually find the information makes all the difference.
Scribner, Kenn; Seely, Scott: Effective REST Services via .NET and Shaw, John; Evans, Simon: Pro ADO.NET Data Services – Working with RESTful Data: These two join a group of books about REST. While I’m not saying REST is all the future and SOAP/WS-* is a thing of the past, there certainly is merit in REST’s simplism, both protocol- and philosophy-wise. If you don’t know REST yet, it’s a good idea to spend some time familiarizing yourself with the concepts if only to recognize a RESTful implementation when it comes your way.
Hashimi, Sayed Ibrahim; Bartholomew, William: Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build: There is nothing like wrangling TFS build scripts into submission. Everything build-related should be automated, and this one should help us crack the last nuts.
Moroney, Laurence: Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 3: Isn’t this obvious? And hey, it was RTM’d yesterday: get the bits and read what’s new!
Esposito, Dino: Microsoft ASP.NET and AJAX: Architecting Web Applications: Actually understanding how AJAX and ASP.NET co-operate is key, both in Web Forms and MVC world. Throwing an ASP.NET AJAX application together and then debugging it for days simply because you don’t understand how AJAX works is… well, waste.
Ford, Sara: Microsoft Visual Studio Tips: 251 Ways to Improve Your Productivity: None of us really knows what are all the things Visual Studio could do for us. But you can also read Sara’s blog to get some of the goodness…
Hunt, Andrew; Thomas, David: Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit: There’s always room for more unit testing knowledge. Pragmatic Programmers have historically tended to be very, well, pragmatic, so I look forward to this one. NUnit or VSTS, it doesn’t really make that big of a difference philosophy-wise.
Jennings, Roger: Professional ADO.NET 3.5 with LINQ and the Entity Framework: Understanding just LINQ in its entirety is a challenge, but throw in the complexities of Entity Framework and you have a decent chance of getting lost. But as EF starts maturing (looking forward to EFv4 in .NET 4.0!), it’s definitely coming on. Whether or not you could do with something more simple depends on your conditions.
Thomas, Dave: Programming Ruby 1.9: Every bookshelf should have its share of books that no-one directly needs but that provide a change of mindset when you need it. Ruby and other dynamic languages have a word to say in the future development, so why not be forearmed?
Goyvaerts, Jan; Levithan, Steven: Regular Expressions cookbook: Perhaps The Thing every programmer should teach himself, not only to do pattern matching but to understand various frameworks and problem sets more easily. From the guy who brought you www.regular-expressions.info.
Velez, Gustavo: Workflows and SharePoint – Going with the flow: The SharePoint world is another thing entirely. While workflows are just the same old Workflow Foundation stuff, it’s worth saying that they are somewhat ill-represented and thus underused. SharePoint is no exception in this sense. WF 4.0 should make life more interesting soonish, though.