Books books books books….

The folks @ db4o were kind enough to send me a copy of the new book “The Definitive Guide to db4o” today. A few months back I filled out some survey for them – lo and behold – free book Since i am a book junkie – this is of course pleasing. I have been talking about db4o for some time now – cool technology! My 1st quick flip was good – we’ll see how insightful the books is. 1 thing I can say so far is that I love that the software is for java and .net – so is the book.

I have also been trying to get around to reading “My Life as a Quant : Reflections on Physics and Finance”. After chatting with a collegue today about it – he was kind enough to lend it to me… Since I am on Wall St these days – and I know lots o quant folks, seems right up my alley. I am sort of a wanna-be-quant myself – just under-qualified

Since I am mentioning books – I also have this one on the way – C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4 I love linux, I love desktop apps (been doing desktop app frameworks for some time now). Need to get up to speed on KDE/ QT development. I am particularly interested in perusing alternative event routing/ event bus techniques and the slots/ signals is a different paradigm then how you skink the events cat in .net.

… and this one (I am a fan of Robert Martin – Author 1, and I have a son named Micah, Author 2 – had to get it). From the description:

Readers will come away from this book understanding:

• Agile principles, and the fourteen practices of Extreme Programming
• Spiking, splitting, velocity, and planning iterations and releases
• Test driven development, test first design, and acceptance testing
• Refactoring with unit testing
• Pair programming
• Agile design and design smells
• The Single Responsibility Principle and the Open Closed Principle
• The Liskov Substitution Principle and the Dependency Inversion Principle
• The Interface Segregation Principle, and Separation through Delegation and Multiple Inheritance
• The five types of UML diagrams and how to use them effectively
• Object-oriented package design and design patterns
• How to put all of this together for a real-world project

The emphasis is mine – the things that I talk about all the time – really – and the things that stood out to me. While I have been doing ALL this stuff for some time now – introducing it to new people/ places is still hard sometimes. This all sounds like potential angles and ways to explain wins of these techniques
Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#

… the last one I have on the way is – Interface Oriented Design : With Patterns A portion of the description interested me … “You’ll learn by pragmatic example how to create effective designs composed of interfaces to objects, components and services.” I think I have read ALL the patterns/ practices books out there. There is not too much new under the sun in this space. That said – the fine points of composing a nice object model is still key and warrants discussion. People under and over use interfaces all too often. People also suffer from the pitfals of “infrastructure driven packaging” – and other poor componentization problems. Who knows – maybe this will be as good a read as the 1st prag prog book.

In case you cant tell – I REALLY value books, education … information. Believe it or not – I love all this stuff!

-Chris

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