Games from Within

Pair programming really needs to be experienced to be fully appreciated. Just a few years ago, I loved my single office and I was completely against the idea of spending all my time programming with somebody else sitting at the same computer. Today I advocated using pair programming at work and I gladly gave up my office to work in a pair-programming lab alongside the whole team. Funny how things change.

Exactly a year ago today, I put up the first article on Games from Within. It was a review of Tom DeMarco's book Slack. I thought it would make for a nice, symmetrical bookend to wrap the year up with a review for another book by DeMarco: Waltzing with Bears. As the subtitle indicates, Waltzing with Bears deals with managing risk in software development projects. Managing risk, not reducing risk, or removing risk. Do you think that low risk or even no risk is a good thing? Think again.

Have you read Effective C++ also by Scott Meyers? No? Go buy it right now, read it, reread it, and then come back here. I guarantee that it will make a huge difference in the way you work.

Even though I read a lot of technical books, either I must have pretty good instincts or the publishing quality bar is quite high, because I never read one I thought was totally worthless. Until now that is.

Over the years I've read hundreds of technical books. Some of them had some great new ideas, others were great introductions to specific topics, and others had a knack for explaining some complex topic in a very easy to understand way. But in the end, which books had the most impact on me? If I had to go back and pick only a handful of books, which ones would I pick? This is that list.