Books books books…

It took quite longer than I had expected, but by the end of the year I bought few books from Amazon, and finally, they’re here.

(HINT: You can use the   link to see some more books I’d love to have… and then buy some for me ).

Anyway, here’s what I bought:

After I placed the order, I noticed that I have very similar taste to Casey Charlton, but I digress.

This is one of all-time classic books on software engineering so it was an easy choice, given my goal for this year, is to stop being just a coder, and get deeper into architectural part of software engineering. This is the book, that anyone keeps on referring to over and over, so it’s good to have it on my shelve.

Since the project I’m working on, is hugely distributed, and a lot of work I’ve been doing lately was designing and coding WCF services I really wanted a solid book on grand picture of distributed systems. At first I thought about buying one of WCF-specific books, but then I decided, that considering how quickly this technology is evolving, such book would quickly get outdated. Also, I don’t really like API-centric books, and most of the books I’ve found seemed to be falling into this category. Since I’m already quite proficient with using the API, that would not provide much value to me.

Instead, this book concentrates on patterns, and design issues, which is both, more important to me, and more timeless.

This is another classic, and it fits very well with the other two books, creating together one big repository of patterns and design ideas that proved to be very successful and popular, especially among ALT.NET circles. So I thought it would be a shame, if I didn’t know this one first-hand.

Actually at first I wanted only to get the first three books (they’re already quite expensive), but then I thought that I should really get something, dare I say, lighter. Something I could read without causing my brain to overburn, and so, based on Ayende’s recommendation I picked “Release It!“. It nicely plays with the topics touched upon in the other books, while it seems to be more narrative and reflectional than the other books. We’ll see how that will play out.

I know that last time, I had promised to put up reviews of the books I bought, as I read them, and I didn’t. No excuse here. However I thought that there are already tons of good reviews and I really didn’t have anything new to add to the mix. So, this time, if I have something to say, I will, but I make no promises.