My wife gave me two new books for Christmas:
- Refactoring to Patterns by Joshua Kerievsky
- Effective C#, 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your C# by Bill Wagner
She gave them to me early because I have been looking around for a new book to replace the recently finished Applying UML and Patterns by Craig Larman.
By coincidence, I mentioned Refactoring to Patterns in a recent post: Refactoring - Code Smells - Refactoring Patterns. Refactoring to Patterns seems well recommended in the development community along with Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler. I have not read the Fowler book, but it doesn't seem to be a prerequisite, more of a nice to have :)
I have read the first 7 (of 50) items of Effective C# by Bill Wagner and it is a fun read. The presentation of the ideas are short, to the point, and very useful. I love these kinds of books, because they give you real-world information that often must come from experience and is rarely mentioned in blogs and almost never found in examples and tutorials.
I will talk more about these books in subsequent posts as I read them further.