My Year In Books

This is how Amazon made its money out of me in 2009:

ASP.NET MVC 1.0

A good introduction to the MVC Framework at the time but seemed to be just thrown out there to catch the market. The biggest chapter (“Nerd Dinner”) was actually given away for free before the book was released to coincide with the release of the framework. If you haven’t already brought it, get something else is my advice…

LINQ in Action

My first Manning book. It gave me everything I needed to know to get me developing using LINQ in a clear and well thought out manner. As it’s such a rich book covering so many different facets of LINQ, I think I’ll re-read it later this year and probably discover something I previously missed.

jQuery in Action

It was like buying my first copy of Razzle! Have I mentioned jQuery rocks?! There are so many projects I would have liked to used jQuery on, in the last 10 years. This book gives you everything you need to get you started and although it may take you a solid day or two to read, I can guarantee it will save you days of hacking about with JavaScript for every subsequent project.

MCTS Training Kit Exam 70-536

Pretty much everything you need to know about the .NET framework prior to deciding if you want to specialize in Web/Winforms development using the .NET Stack. It’s essential reading regardless of if you want to take the 70-536 exam or not. (I really don’t know how they’re going to condense all this down into one exam with a platform specialty subject in 2010)

The Art Of Unit Testing

This book helped me realise I was on the right lines with how I am using unit tests. I like the way Roy Osherove encourages the developer to think of the unit tests as end users of the code we write, as well as the human beings on the end of the keyboard.

Going Open Source

I brought Dive Into Python, The Definitive Guide to DJango and UBuntu 2010 Edition to support my spur into the open source space. I’ll probably do a couple posts on that subject from a Microsoft Dev’s perspective later in the year.

Here’s to the Amazon “One-Click” Facade.

You helped me spend my money wisely this year….