Books In The Queueueueue

(I spell it that way because I was raised in Jerry Brown’s California educational system and I figure a few extra “u” and “e” characters can’t hurt.)

Here are a few books I’ve partially skimmed but haven’t had time to fully read and report on.  I’ll get reviews out on them shortly.

Implementation Patterns by Kent Beck.  This is a manuscript copy I got before publication because, as I told the publicist, I’d happily read Beck’s grocery list if he published it.  The book is concise and appears to cover patterns to help you keep your code readable and maintainable.  Examples are in Java, but if you can’t get over that then you need to get over that.

Visual Studio Team System: Better Software Development for Agile Teams by Will Stott and James Newkirk.  Yes, that James Newkirk.  I’ve been sitting on this one for months and haven’t gotten a review out for it yet.  It’s a fine book with a lot of great content on how to do Agile (or at least some folks’ version of it) in VSTS.  There’s some jewels in here that don’t get much coverage in works — think FIT/Fitnesse and similar goodies.  I have some quibbles with the organization of the chapters, but overall it’s a very nice book.

Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with Nunit, 2^nd ed.  Andy Hunt.  Dave Thomas.  Testing.  NUnit.  Nuff said.  I’m stoked about getting through this one because their approaches to doing testing look like a huge boost.

Head First SQL  My SQL is weak, and it’s all weak knowledge from Oracle 7/8 and Sybase 10 days.  Barf.  I’m hoping this book will help me increase my SQL karma points.

SharePoint 2007: The Definitive Guide.  Looks shiny.  It appears to be a high- to mid– level guide to many features in MOSS, not a deep dive.  That’s fine because I’ve got other deep dive books.  Appears to be well-written, but I’ve only had a glance or two at it.

Windows Developer Power Tools.  Wait, you’ve heard plenty about that here already…

There are a passle of others in the queueueue, but this is what’s bubbled up to the top.  (Actually, Beck’s book pretty much landed on the top when it arrived last week.)