Books General
Prefactoring
Ken Pugh (O'Reilly & Associates)
Ken Pugh
When I first heard the term "prefactoring" I thought, "Great, yet another marketing buzzword created solely to sell books and services." Was I ever wrong. Ken Pugh captures fundamental design concepts that every developer should understand—and because of its cool title, there's a chance that developers might actually read the book.
Prefactoring summarizes techniques (and provides concrete examples and advice) for developing high-quality code. This book covers the fundamentals that all developers should know, but often don't. Among the techniques Pugh describes are how to reduce coupling, increase cohesion, take an interface-centric approach, and write literate code. The term "prefactoring" may achieve buzzword status—not because it's a marketing scam but because it represents a collection of solid technical concepts. Prefactoring is a "must read" book for anyone new to software development, and a "should read" book for everyone else.
—Scott W. Ambler
Productivity Award Winners
The Art of Project Management
Scott Berkun (O'Reilly & Associates)
Scott Berkun's experience as a Microsoft project manager has paid off. The Art of Project Management is filled with real-world pragmatism, no-nonsense advice, and honest expectations. I'm looking forward to more of his ideas on effective application development across a lifecycle. The Art of Project Management is a required reading handbook that every software project manager should own.
—Mike Riley
Innovation Happens Elsewhere:
Open Source as Business Strategy
Ron Goldman and Richard P. Gabriel (Morgan Kaufmann)
Successful software products are seldom built from scratch. They are built on products, libraries, frameworks, and technologies from a variety of sources that are increasingly open source. Ron Goldman and Richard Gabriel's Innovation Happens Elsewhere, an overview of the open-source landscape, provides valuable knowledge about managing open-source projects and discusses the business reasons for choosing open-source alternatives.
—Gary Pollice
Producing Open Source Software:
How to Run a Successful Free Software Project
Karl Fogel (O'Reilly & Associates)
Karl Fogel, whose open-source résumé includes CVS, Subversion, and Emacs, knows that open-source software projects must be nurtured, led, and managed. Producing Open Source Software provides practical advice on how to set up open-source projects, attract good people to them, keep them on track, and even how to make money doing it.
—Rick Wayne
