Book Club Recap – Spring 2008

“WPF Unleashed” by Adam Nathan is THE definitive starter book for Windows Presentation Foundation. I can’t sing praises for it enough but in summary, IMHO, no one who did not write WPF itself should be writing WPF applications without having read this book.

July 29, 2008 · Anthony D. Green · No Comments
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Book Club Update February 2008

I finished “About Face” sometime around the turn of the month. In desperation I grabbed “The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master” by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas soon thereafter and fortunately so; that very evening my commute home (and my commute the following morning to work) was delayed when my bus broke down on the expressway. I’ll spare you the Chicagoan sentiment for the Chicago Transit Authority. Also as foretold I’ve been reading this book in parallel with a fiction work in the StarCraft universe, alternating daily. I’ve already finished both Gabriel Mesta’s “Shadow of the Xel’Naga” and Christie Golden “StarCraft: The Dark Templar Saga: Firstborn”.

February 21, 2008 · Anthony D. Green · No Comments
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My Book Club of One

In my last post I mentioned that I’d just started “Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture” and planned to read “Refactoring” after that. I have since read them both and at least 1.5 others. I’d actually started my next post when I finished Patterns but due to the aforementioned coupling it never saw the light of day.

After Refactoring I decided to finish another book that I’d skimmed “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity” by Alan Cooper. The book makes a lot of good points about the fundamental disconnect between the mental models of the end users and software developers (I know I’ve been guilty of projecting my own level of comfort unto my users). The book makes a strong case for the need of “Interaction Designers” and “Goal-Directed Design”. So much so that after finishing it I went and grabbed a copy of “About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design” by Alan Cooper et al. While I’m still reconciling some of the principles of Goal-Directed Design with Domain-Driven Design (and Test-Driven Development, Object-Oriented Programming, Service-Oriented Architecture, and several other acronyms) About Face reinforces the arguments made by Inmates and really brings to light some of the dunderheaded user interaction decisions we programmers can make.

January 27, 2008 · Anthony D. Green · No Comments
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