Ship It!: A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects is focussed on one core idea: “The List”. The place in which you track your (and your teams) to-do and done work. I do not agree with everything written in the book but would still want to recommend it.

Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management first let’s you look behind the closed doors of all those private meetings and then provides you a set of techniques that allow you to be(come) a better manager. All 160 pages were worth reading!

Brownfield Application Development in .NET is one of the better books i have read recently. The first part is about the ecosystem (version control, automated build, continuous integration, testing, defect management, … ), the second part is about the code (OO-principles, layering, dependencies, ui patterns, …) and the last chapter talks about ways to maintain the momentum. Very much recommended!

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know was the last book that i wanted to read at the pool during summer holidays. As with all 97 things books you get a lot of valuable tips but i found this book not as exciting as the previous ones…

Not going to waste time re-iterating what’s in the book because you can find that here: Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash. Just make sure that you get your copy and read it from beginning to end. Afterwards you may want to hand it over to your manager

The first part of the book covers some tools that may improve your productivity (but nothing that i did not use already). The second part covers development techniques (again, nothing new under the sun). Despite the author’s intentions i found reading The Productive Programmer a disappointment.

A while ago i noticed that Davy Brion recommended Debug It!: Find, Repair, and Prevent Bugs in Your Code so i decided to give it a read. Although i really liked the suggested process for investigating bugs where you have absolutely no clue of what is going on, i am not convinced that this is a must read book.

A while ago i noticed that more and more of my work is related to coaching and managing other developers. In order to become better at that i ordered my copy of Manage It!: Your Guide to Modern Pragmatic Project Management. A book with plenty of useful (practical) tips. Definitely worth reading!

Around new year i found out that i would be working with SQL Server 2008 so i needed a crash course. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Internals is really not intended to be that, but it does cover the basics and then dives (way too) deep in detail. Although i stopped reading halfway the dives i found the book very interesting!

Given the fact that i have been developing software for MS-Windows the last couple of years i found it important to learn a bit more about the internals of the operating systems on which my applications run so i ordered a copy of Windows Internals: Including Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, Fifth Edition back in september and learned quite a bit from the chapters that i found interesting: security, authorization, networking and analyzing crashes. I skimmed through the chapters on memory management, scheduling and file systems because they reminded me too much of Tanenbaum’s excellent Modern Operating Systems.