My Top 5 Books of 2012

This is one of my favorite post of the year to write. It gives me the opportunity to look back on some of the great books I read during the past year. Most of them are highly coupled to my current job as a Software Engineer within an architecture deparment. Nevertheless I have chosen one book into the top that is more management driven, because it is the best thing I have read so far (about project management).

No. 1  The Passionate Programmer 
Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development
by Chad Fowler

Chad Fowler is a great "Programming Lifestyle Engineer". He tells us what we need to do to be successfull as an IT-Spezialist. The book contains tons of stunning wisdoms like the "Broken Window Theory" or statements like "You can't win if you just try not to lose." It is so common for developers to be unsatisfied because they only try not to lose. They do not push thier own skill and never try to win a knowledge race. I recommend this book to everyone who is working at the IT.


No. 2  A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge 
4th Edition
by Project Management Institute

A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) is a book which presents a set of standard terminology and guidelines for project management. The Fourth Edition (2008) is the document resulting from work overseen by the Project Management Institute (PMI). The Guide recognizes 42 processes that fall into five basic process groups and nine knowledge areas that are typical of almost all projects. By that the PMBOK Guide is a very complete systematical approach to handle project specific complexity. Moreover PMI has an practical orientation. It is made by practitioner for practitioner. And that is what I appreciate. "Hands-on" project management.





No. 3  Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
Martin Fowler Signature Series
by Martin Fowler

This outstanding collection of Enterprise Patterns leads into the topic of Enterprise Architecture and describes some handpicked design patterns. Each pattern describes details of how it works and when to use it, together with code examples. The main topic areas are: how to layer an enterprise application, how to organize domain logic, how to tie that logic to a relational database, how to design a web based presentation, some important principles in distributed design, and handling of what we call "offline concurrency" - concurrency that spans transactions. This book helped me a lot to understand unknown frameworks as well as designen and developing enterprise software.




No. 4  Java Puzzlers: Traps, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases
by Joshua Bloch, Neal Gafter

The topic tells everthing about the book. It is just a crazy collection of traps, pitfalls and corner cases of the Java Language 2.0. For me as an big Java Fan it has been a lot of fun to read this book and try to solve or figure out the snippets. It is as an brainteaser almost as good as the concurrency courses of Heinz Kabutz.






 


No. 5  Java Web Services in der Praxis
Realisierung einer SOA mit WSIT, Metro und Policies
by Oliver Heuser, Andreas Holubek

This is a german book that I have to mention. I used it to prepare for my "Oracle Certified Expert - Java EE 6 Web Services Developer" Exam. I was looking for informativ stuff, that could help me to learn all the things that I needed. And this is by far the best thing I found. It covers almost everything you need to know if you take it serious with Web Services and you want to use them in an enterprise environment.