Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art: The Black Art Demystified (Best Practices (Microsoft))
Steve McConnell

£27.97

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This is another great book by Steve McConnell.

His empahsis is on large projects with thourough development processes; he gives many examples of rigorous studes that back up his advice.

If you follow all the advice in this book - you'll be able to make very accurate estimates with a clear idea of the risks involved.

Even if you don't need so much detail - the book provides many tips to greatly improve the accuracy of even rough calculations. 

Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
Steve Krug

£20.69

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This book is well written, short, and clear.

It has reassured me about much of what I do - and given me some pointers for areas I can improve on.

One of the great things about this book is the way it addresses the combination of technical and political issues that web projects can get bogged down in - it has a nice section called "Help my boss wants me to ___" with some good sample letters to the boss.

It really brings home that conventions are useful - and you need to test the site on users - little and often.

Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties: Advanced SQL Programming (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)
Joe Celko

£31.34

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I was really looking forward to reading this book, it had been on my wish list for years....

But it's hard to know how to tackle it.

This is a heavyweight book and it's mostly organised by SQL keyword with some chapters on subjects like temporal queries and statistics.

It seems to me that the best way to read this book is cover to cover - but for me it's just to big to do that.

The book also suffers from being too oriented towards 'pure' SQL, spending pages on features that aren't yet available.

Test Driven Development (The Addison-Wesley Signature Series)
Kent Beck

£21.97

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The premise of this book is to design organically (No grand plans).

Programming is reduced to the sequence

• write a test
• write code that passes the test
• clean up that code (remove any duplication)

Much of the book is about getting into and keeping a good programming mindset - one nice tip is to always leave a failing test at the end of the day (this give you something concrete to start on the next day).

This book has changed the way I work (a bit).

Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Robert C Martin)
Michael Feathers

£48.22

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While waiting for a long database import to run I've been browsing my Safari bookshelf and this book looks really good.

I haven't by any means read the whole thing - but it really seems to have answers to questions I have been asking.

The topic of legacy code is one I have worked with a lot - and it's always challenging.

This book deals well with the technical, business, emotional and social impacts of this work.
With chapter titles like

      Chapter 6. I Don't Have Much Time and I Have to Change It

Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction
Steven C. McConnell

£29.95

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Don't buy this book!

Mastering Regular Expressions (Nutshell Handbooks)
Jeffrey E. F. Friedl

£26.01

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Regular expressions are fantastic - they can be an incredibly compact and efficient way of achieving all sorts of common programming tasks.

They started in Perl but are now available in many languages.

The best regular expressions are both powerful and very clear in what they do.

But with great power comes ... the learning curve.

Many programmers seem to be put off by the apparently arcane syntax.

This book greatly softens the learning curve for beginners - and goes on to provide truly expert advice.

Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary
Linus Torvalds
David Diamond

£35.33

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I found this a surprisingly good read, it's very well written and manages to compress the history of Linux development in to few enough pages that I was caught up with the excitement.

One chapter is quite technical (which was interesting for me) but the rest of the book is much more the personal story of Linus' life from obssesssed and isolated nerd to rich and famous nerd with a family fast car and mansion.

Some parts are quite though provoking on the matters of open source, and what (if any) obligations one has in response to projects like Linux.

Linux in a Nutshell (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly))
Ellen Siever
Aaron Weber
Stephen Figgins
Robert Love
Arnold Robbins

£26.72

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I've been using Linux for 10 years and I still periodilcally re-visit this book.

It's one of the tech books I've read cover to cover (a couple of times) and still each time I read it I've learned something new in the first 5 minutes.

The more I learn, the more concepts appear on the horizon, and so new parts of the book become relavent. 

Linux is complex and powerful, it has more features than you'll ever discover by accident; reading an alphabetical list of commands is a great way to find those undiscovered gems.

Pro Drupal Development
VanDyk

£23.67

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This is one of the best technical books I have read in a while.

It assumes that you already know PHP (which makes sense given the 'Pro' in the title) and it doesn't even use up space telling you how to download and install Drupal.

Instead it concentrates its 400 odd pages on telling you stuff that isn't readily available elsewhere: in a concise, easy to read, format.

I find it gets the balance between theory and example just right, so that you end up understanding why something works the way it does - and how to implement it.