Cockburn's tolerance for extensibility and flexibility offers practitioners a foot-hold for transitioning toward agile practices.

Useful documentation has its place, but it should be succinct, worded simply, and presented well.

McConnell posits Engineering as the ideal model for that professional maturation process, and he makes many solid arguments in its favor.  Most of these points are based on the central idea of reusability.  This is not just recycling the data access library you wrote for your last project...

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture does exactly what it sets out to do: provide the reader with a catalog of proven enterprise level patterns and the knowledge to use them.  Fowler describes an architectural pattern as...

Software engineering is a term often used to encompass the entire range of software development, from creating high-level architectural designs to low-level coding. In Software Craftsmanship: The New Imperitive, Pete McBreen proposes a more strict definition...

If a book about software development has sold over 250,000 copies (almost unheard of for technical books) and after 28 years is still in print, and selling well, it's a pretty good bet that it has something significant to offer.

Just about any developer these days who works in an object oriented language would do well to have at least cursory knowledge of the seemingly ubiquitous Unified Modeling Language (UML). If this acronym is not on your resume, then that is a hole you might want to fill.

Hunt and Thomas's The Pragmatic Programmer is the logical companion to another great book about software construction, Steve McConnell's Code Complete.  Indeed, these two books make great companion volumes. Were they from the same publisher, they could be sold as a set.

Several years ago, when I was just getting started as a software developer, I read Steve McConnell's Code Complete all the way through, cover to cover.  Then I went back and read several sections again.  There is no question in my mind that...

While this is not specifically a computer-oriented book, it is nonetheless a must-read for anyone who designs and develops computer software. I have learned more about design, especially user interface design, from this book than any other book that I've read...

This is probably my favorite book on the subject of software development.  It is definitely my favorite of Weinberg's many excellent books.  I return to this book again and again, and find something new every time.

This book is essential reading for anyone involved in the construction of software using object oriented languages. Fowler and his fellow contributors do an incredible job of simultaneously introducing and formalizing a code improvement technique called "refactoring."