Software Company Library

Question

Hi.
A few days ago i had the idea to create a company library since my company has no training and many developers still develop as they did when they learned it 5 years ago. My hope is that they can lend books, read them and hopefully learn something from them (for example: object oriented programming or unit testing, which noone here knows how to use).

After asking around most agreed that it was a good idea, so i brought my books, made a simple printed sheet with "Book A belongs to B" and "Developer A took the Book on dd.mm.yyyy" to get it started.

Now i want to get some ideas for Books that i could add to the shelf (sadly from my own money since 100€/month for training is too much money for this multi-million euro company).

We develop mostly PHP & MySQL so books specific to this topic would be preferred but i think if people learn other languages they might get ideas on how to develop better with the current language so other books are ok, too.

Which books would you recommend?

PS: Personally i'd like to add some Project Management books, too, as it's a topic i'm interested in, eventhough i'm just a junior developer (We've got Peopleware already, great book btw).

Answer 1

Agile Software Development (Cockburn)

Domain Driven Design (Evans)

Beautiful Code (several authors)

Code Complete (McConnell)

Answer 2

Get something about Ruby on Rails or Django :)

You can try Design Patterns (Erich Gamma et al.) or something from Martin Fowler.

Answer 3

Joel Spolsky has answered this question in his Joel on Software blog.

There was also discussion with more suggestions.

Answer 4

Codinghorror.com has some excellent suggested books on a variety of topics.

Answer 5

Why not invest in a safari books licence ?
It allows you to read all the books you want online, and download a few chapters every month. They were doing recently a 30% off offer to stackoverflow users. I took it and have no regrets.

Answer 6

I like the Book "Domain Driven Design" from Eric Evans

Answer 7

This isn't really an answer, more an extended comment ...

I think @dbemerlin is far too noble. Lending your own books to the company so that your colleagues can become better programmers is a mug's game. Far better to invest your own time and money in yourself and your own career. You are exceedingly naive to expect that your colleagues will, if offered books to read, become better programmers and create less of a mess for you to debug. You'd be better off in pushing for a quality improvement initiative aimed at reducing the mess. You'd be better off because:

• you would be keeping more of your own hard-earned money in your own pocket;
• you would be taking actions with some possibility of tackling the real problem;
• and who knows, your tight employers might be impressed by the initiative you show.

Failing that, invest your time and effort into learning how to better debug the mess, that's a very valuable skill to add to your own resume.

Answer 8

I'll skip the classics.

Refactoring SQL Applications might improve your MySQL knowledge, with an eye towards the more mature and complete DBMSs.

Various SQL and refactoring techiniques are explained with graphs comparing the behaviour of Oracle, MSSql and MySql. Since MySQL doesn't have a good query optimizer, it differs in many ways.

It's almost a follow-up to The Art Of SQL (which I also recommend).

But watch out: after reading the book, you might become aware of the shortcomings of mysql and start experimenting with postgres :-)

And now for something completely different: 19 Deadly Sins of Software Security and Ajax Design Patterns.