Comments on: 15 Books To Make You a Better Software Engineer (Not Web-Developer Designer)

By: engfer

engfer — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:23:58 +0000

@Caligula. I appreciate the comment and the discrepancy is noted; my real complaint is more of the "design" aspect of "web-stuff"; however, I must say that I have learned plenty about web-design from Digg/etc and I am thankful for that). Yeah we get it: engineers design things and developers make them, so sue me. Am I mistaken that good software engineers are good developers? Corky Example: I guess he's thinking of my "confusion" in terms of class-inheritance: the SoftwareEngineer.class extends SoftwareDeveloper.class... and my pointer (article) is of type SoftwareEngineer, so I can't hold any instances of SoftwareDeveloper. He just wants to make sure to say that my pointer (article) should have been of type SoftwareDeveloper (so it could hold SoftwareEngineer and SoftwareDeveloper classes) My apologies. @Doc. Thanks! I'll definitely have to check those out!

By: Doc

Doc — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 12:28:11 +0000

Nice. I’ve got almost all of these, and I imagine I’ll be adding “Introduction to Algorithms” to my bookshelf soon. I’ll also throw in a plug for “Perspectives on Web Services” (Zimmerman, et. al., Springer 2003). It’s an excellent survey of the current state of web service technologies, with detailed analyses of SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, and the various WS-* standards. It was written by some IBM Global Services consultants (which gives a decidedly IBM-oriented slant, but it’s not obtrusive) and includes sample code and warnings about pitfalls to avoid when choosing a technology or prototyping something in it. Very readable.

I’ll also mention Jon Bentley’s “Programming Pearls” books, and of course “Code Complete” by Steve Connell. Oh, and just to further tweak @Caligula , the “J2EE Developer’s Handbook” is a good companion to “Core J2EE Patterns”. Lock yourself in a room for a week with these two and emerge a J2EE guru!

By: Caligula

Caligula — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 11:57:25 +0000

Oh, dear.

Most of these books don’t have anything to do with software engineering, although some may help you become a better developer.

Depressing.

It’s particularly inappropriate to include _Refactoring HTML_ on the list since you were attempting to target non-web-development. It’s a pretty weak book anyway, but contains absolutely nothing that will make you a better software engineer.

We get it–you like patterns and refactoring. Nothing wrong with that, but you’re confusing definitions.

By: engfer

engfer — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 16:32:57 +0000

Thanks much ballfry. If you send me a description, I’ll check it out and add it to the list!

By: ballfry

ballfry — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:22:57 +0000

Nice list. You’re right. Despite what digg or reddit would have us believe, not all of us are freelance web developers. A few of us even work at real companies! Thanks for throwing Fowler out there, more people should know about him.

I’ll throw a .NET specific book into the mix just for fun: CLR via C# by Jeff Richter. If you want to be good at using the .NET framework, this is a must.