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Another year another list of books that I read in 2011. I never read as much as I want/should.

  • Why We Get Fat (11/1/2011)
  • Start Small, Stay Small – Audiobook (30/1/2011)
  • Never Let Go (2/2/2011)
  • Ignore Everybody (10/2/2011)
  • The Hero Handbook (21/2/2011)
  • Mindfulness in Plain English (3/3/2011)
  • Programming Amazon EC2 (18/3/2011)
  • How to Make Money (7/3/2011)
  • Eloquent Ruby (6/5/2011)
  • Snow Crash (18/5/2011)
  • Get out of Jail Free Card (19/5/2011)
  • Hyperion (6/6/2011)
  • Anything You Want (1/7/2011)
  • The Fall of Hyperion (29/7/2011)
  • Motorcycle Roadcraft (6/9/2011)
  • Sport Riding Techniques (20/9/2011)
  • Recipes with Backbone (19/12/2011)
  • The Secrets of the Rainmakers (20/12/2011)
  • The Lean Startup (25/12/2011)

The only book that really stands out for me this year is “Hyperion”. I don’t usually read fiction, but on this occasion I’m extremely glad I did. Never before has a book gripped me as much as this one did. And excellent story which had me desperate to keep going to find out what happened. “Why we get fat” is a very good book on the basics of the modern science behind the obesity epidemic spreading across the world. I found it very hard to read Gary Taubes previous book “Good Calories, Bad Calories”, but this was extremely easy to take in.

I certainly want to be able to read more in 2012. But that’s something I say every year.

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I really didn’t read as much as I had hoped in 2010, but still averaged just over a book a month. The books I read were:

  • Pragmatic Programmer
  • Refactoring Ruby Edition
  • How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life
  • Socialism – A very short introduction
  • Rework
  • Rocket Surgery Made Easy
  • Jiu-Jitsu University
  • Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu: The Closed Guard
  • Infinite Intensity
  • The 4-Hour Workweek – Expanded and Updated
  • 10-Minute Toughness
  • Street Smarts
  • SQL Antipatterns
  • Foundation
  • The Paleo Solution
  • Switch
  • Making Ideas Happen
  • The Rspec Book
  • Web Analytics 2.0

“How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life”, “The Paleo Soution”, “Switch” and “Web Analytics 2.0″ were the main highlights. “Web Analytics 2.0″ especially being what I consider the most important book that any entrepreneur should read in this day and age. Gathering information about your customers and making decisions based on analysis are key to driving your business forward. With so many tools available to us, there’s no need to blindly make guesses about what to improve or what to do next.

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I’ve been meaning to write up a list of what books I think every developer, aspiring or seasoned should read. So let’s cut to the chase, and in no particular order:

Code Complete
If there was ever a bible for coding, this is it. It’s even Bible sized. A nice size to chuck at those annoying developers who just have no clue.

Clean Code
I would consider this book the “Ten Commandments” of coding and compliments Code Complete very very very well. If Code Complete teaches you how to be a Christian, then Clean Code teaches you how to be Jesus.

Refactoring to Patterns
What I love about this book is that it you learn the fundamentals of refactoring at the same time as design patterns. The GoF Design Patterns book is quite heavy going. The examples aren’t well laid out and can be confusing especially if you’re not familiar with SmallTalk The examples in refactoring to patterns all take pretty familiar real world bits of code and walk you through the process of refactoring them into sensible patterns.

Three books? Is that it? Yup. In my mind those are the only three books that are essential reading, no matter what form of development you do. If you even remotely care about coding, then go to Amazon now and buy these books. Read them and take a good long hard look at your own code. If on the other hand you feel “You can’t be bothered” to read, learn and improve, then why are you doing something you don’t love or care about? You’re in the wrong industry if you’re not prepared to take time, all the time, to learn new things. Once you’ve read those, then you’re ready to move onto more specialised books. Here are some of my other favourite development books from over the years:

The Productive Programmer
The Art of Agile Development
Practices of an Agile Developer
Joel on Software
Unix Power Tools
Programming Perl
Essential Java
Well Grounded Rubyist
Design Patterns in Ruby
CSS Mastery
Prioritizing Web Usability

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