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Amazon's Best Computer Books of 2004
theodp writes "Amazon.com's Editors have announced their selections for the Best Books of 2004 in the Computers and Internet category. Their favorite book of the year? Excel Hacks, which edged out Head First Servlets & JSP (#3), a Grand Theft Auto Strategy Guide (#5) and The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit (#8). Can Slashdot readers offer some more inspired choices?"
Doesn't stand against the classics, but since this is for this year only... PHP 5 Power Programming
I am Ergo the magnificent. Short in power, tall in stature, narrow of vision and wide of purpose.
Alternative to Amazon I have some computer related eigenpolls.
Agile Software Development Books
Best Practices for Software Development
Favorit websites
Spam Fighting Software
other books related eigenpoll are:
Alternative Science Books
Real Estate Investment books
Books on Accelerated Learning Techniques
Books for Automatic Trading Systems
Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook by Dan Cederholm Great book about designing web sites using proper xhtml and web standards. Great examples and practicle recipes!
Have a Happy.
Programming Ruby by by Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler, Andy Hunt
Linux Server Hacks, Knoppix Hacks, and Network Security Hacks.
Meh.
Frank Mittelbach, Michel Goossens et al.,
This book, launched in June 2004, is a <em>major</em> rewrite of the old book and for every LaTeX user its worth its price in gold. I have a dog-eared copy at my desk and I can attest to it.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
Booch's _Object Oriented Analysis and Design_, but I didn't get it at Amazon so that could explain their error. :-)
I really liked Edd Dumbbill's book on Mono - clear, concise and with no filler. It's sad that those traits are so unusual in most technical publishing.
/ qid=1101219728/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/102-0124431- 0374516/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596007922
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Oh well, resubmitted with proper formatting...
Frank Mittelbach, Michel Goossens et al., The LaTeX Companion, 2nd edition.
This book, launched in June 2004, is a major rewrite of the old book and for every LaTeX user its worth its price in gold. I have a dog-eared copy at my desk and I can attest to it.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
I was mentored in my first job out of college by a guy who helped McConnell write the new edition...the first edition did more to make me a better developer than any book on a specific language, technology, etc. and the second edition refreshed the code examples with current programming language, incorporated class and OO design, refactoring, and more modern development methods. Good stuff, check it out.
-Programming Ruby the second edition. An excellent book for an excellent language. The second edition is packed full of useful advice and has a huge number of pages devoted to the standard library. I have both the PDF and the actual book. I like the PDF a bit more because it is easily searchable and has some color to it.
-The updated Code Complete. All around good update of a great book.
I am not Dave Thomas, Andy Hunt or Mr. McConnell
.. didn't make it.
.. highly recommended, even if it isn't current!
Okay, maybe C is passé (I personally don't think so), but this book gives a lot of great insight into this wonderful language
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Hackers & Painters
by Paul Graham
Design Patterns Elements of Object Oriented Design by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides. This "classic" is one of my favorite books at the moment. I'll recommend it to the countless college grads and self taught OOP programmers who only know OOP at a syntax/functionality level. It will give you an insight on how to properly design OO systems instead of the common beginners mistake of using OOP as a thin layer on top of more procedural programming. This book will give you a good kickstart on how to properly think and use Object Orientation the way it was meant to be used.
[alk]
This short book of essays is a classic. It does not talk so much about OOP, or Patterns or Xtreme programing but just focuses on how you use code to solve hard problems.
:-)
Programming Pearls
by Jon Louis Bentley
One note. Some of the essays are more then twenty years old. Just say "gigabyte" every where he says kilobyte
Karl
Linux Cookbook, CSS Cookbook, and Java Cookbook.
Out of all the computer books I own, I keep coming back to the Cookbooks over and over.
Meh.
No mentions of Dive Into Python?
Oh, probably, but it deserves redundancy.
It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.
I recently picked up Advanced PHP Programming by George Schlossnagle just the other day and (although I haven't had a chance to dig deeply into it) am very impressed with the content. Unlike so many PHP books, it shows some of the best methods for large scale PHP designs. It covers all of the new features of PHP 5 and explains other advanced topics , such as caching. I was already doing many of these things, but just seeing a different perspective opened a world of possibilities to me (and pointed out where my methodology could use improvement). I'm sure there will be much more to learn as I work through it.
Here's a link:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/067
As for the top books on Amazon.. I'm not sure many self-respecting developers would have many of them...
Since lots of people are linking to books on Amazon, it seems a good time to mention a useful trick mention in O'Reilly's Amazon Hacks: you can link to Amazon products in a much friendlier way, like so:
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/059600542
Where the numeric parameter is the product's ASIN (which, for most books, is also the ISBN). This hack is also detailed on Oreilly.com.
"Refactoring to Patterns" gotta be my favorite software book of the year (assuming it was indeed published in 2004). Finally someone who makes the connection between test-driven development and design patterns!
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
I'm not sure that knowing assembly helps you to write good code -- at least that's what my friends who are reasearchers in compiler optimisation tell me.
Compilers these days are pretty smart. In fact, it seems like they do a better job on optimising code than people think. For example, I remember that the profs at uni used to teach us that binary shifting by one to the left was **way** more efficient than simply multiplying by 2. Indeed, this was true in 1997 (when I was an undergrad). However, with the current compilers, this 1337 trick actually produces slower code. I'm sure that the situation is similar for other such simpleminded tricks.
Another problem is that hardware tricks are inherently targeted to a single machine -- making the code less portable. If one writes trick-free code then the compilers can optimise it as suitable for each architecture.