Caffeinated Coder

…and I’m not just talking about my recent eBay exploits or that million dollar lottery in Ghana that I keep getting notified about via email.

Jurgen Apello, Dutch blogger extraordinaire, just notified me that I won his $100 Book Contest for my Driving Forces Behind My Coding Compulsion post, which I submitted a couple of weeks ago as an answer to his contest question about what motivates developers to do their job really well.

Somehow his alleged jury members chose me as the winner. I suspect that either I was the only non-fictitious person to enter the contest or else the winner was totally chose by random, but either way I made off with $100 Amazon gift certificate to spend on any of the books featured in his Top 100 Software Engineering Book List that he recently posted.

I decided it was best to indulge in my guilt-free tech book buying frenzy as soon as possible in case he changed his mind.

Here’s what I came up with:

My Choices

$100 isn’t very much money when it comes to tech books, but I stretched it out by shopping in the used book section.

6 Robert C. Martin
Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns and Practices

This Uncle Bob book has been recommended to me so many times that it was the first one I thought to look for on the list. I didn’t know there was an updated C# version until I poked around some more on Amazon.

19 Andrew Hunt, David Thomas
The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

This is one of those books that I read several chapters over several lunch hours at the bookstore, but never got around to buying. I figured it was only fair that I finally throw some royalty love their way.

42 Mary Poppendieck, Tom Poppendieck
Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit

I’ve been hearing about this from Alt.NET bloggers like David Laribee for quite a while so I figured I should find out what all the fuss is about.

If Only I Had More Money to Spend…

These books were close runner-ups.

2 Elisabeth Freeman, etc.
Head First Design Patterns - I’ve heard high praise for this book, but it’s hard to get too excited about design patterns after all the blogosphere backlash related to their overuse and misapplication.

16 Donald E. Knuth
The Art of Computer Programming, The, Volumes 1-3 Boxed Set (2nd Edition) - I figured I would do my part to jump on the Back-To-Basics bandwagon.

18 Jeffrey Friedl
Mastering Regular Expressions - I desperately need to improve my RegEx-fu, but I ultimately decided that I could limp by with the help of the most amazing Expresso tool for now.

74 Michael Nygard
Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software - Ayende has talked this book up quite a few times, so it remains on my ‘Books I should eventually buy and possibly even read’ list.

Current Bookshelf Favorites

I already had several of the books on his list, but these three are my favorites and the ones I would most recommend. They’ve easily had the biggest positive influence on my career as a developer.

1 Steve McConnell
Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction

10 Martin Fowler
Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code 

58 Michael Feathers
Working Effectively with Legacy Code

The one book I really wished was on the list was Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans, but beggars can’t be choosers.

** UPDATE: I just got the full list from Jurgen, which contained the last 25 books on his list. It turns out that Eric Evan’s book was number 89. That’s what I get for being impatient and picking my books too soon.

Thanks again to Jurgen for his most excellent prize.

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