Tim Barcz

at my office, we've done Friday Lunch-N-Learn sessions for the last 2 years off-and-on. Everyone reads the same chapter every week, then on friday, the company buys lunch and we all sit around and discuss the chapter for 2 hours. it's worked really really well for our department. out of about 45 developers, we average around 15 in the session every week.

these are the books we have done so far:

* Code Complete 2nd Edition

* Design Patterns In C#

* Domain Driven Design

our next book, staring in the new year will be:

* Working Effectively With Legacy Code

and after that, we'll be doing

* Agile Principles Patterns and Practices in C#

if i were to re-order these books, i'd do Code Complete before DDD, and i'd do Legacy Code before Agile Principles and Patterns. the design patterns book can be important if your team does not know anything about design patterns already, but was primarily just reference material for us.

the most important aspect of our succes, though, is ensuring that everyone in the room knows that their opinion is valid and valuable - even if others disagree. repeat the mantra of "there are no wrong answers. there are no dumb questions" at the start of every meeting, until the team truly believe it.

it's also become important for our sessions to have a designated leader. in general, i took this duty for the Domain Driven Design book. another senior dev did the Code Complete book, etc. the "leader" is responsible for sending out the meeting request every week, announcing what chapter to read, and ordering the food for everyone. the leader is also responsible for leading the discussion down productive paths, related to the chapter. it's really easy for the sessions to turn into complaint-fests, and the leader needs to be able to redirect the conversation back to productive when it goes off track.

These may be a bit too info-architecture / Semantic Web for backend developers, but they're damned interesting:

Hackers and Painters

Ambient Findability

Everyware

Everything is Miscellaneous

My story was similar to Derrick's.  Each book had a someone to lead discussions, mostly to make sure that discussions moved forward and we had good talking points.  The leader also might bring up examples from current applications to apply the knowledge.

We did:

- Pragmatic Programmer

- A technical ASP.NET book

- Framework Design Guidelines (we were shipping a public API)

- Agile Principles, Practices and Patterns

- Legacy Code

- DDD

Others we wanted to do included Code Complete and Head First Design Patterns.  DDD is a good book to do, but it'll require quite a few pieces in place before any of it makes any sense.  I'd suggest starting with the building blocks - PragProg, the Head First books, etc. to build a solid foundation.  DDD is a heavy, intense book that requires good OO understanding to know why it's needed.

I suggested and my company has put all developers on O'Reilly's Safari bookshelf. We are about to start our own book club.

If I could I would like to have everyone in my team read all those thick and dense books we all know about, some already mentioned here. Unfortunately I think that would be a guaranteed way of killing the club half-way through the first book.

Instead I'm suggesting books that are relatively thin and engaging:

- High Performance Websites (Souders)

- Javascript, The good parts (Crockford)

- Ship It! (Gwaltney, Richardson) - not in Safari

- The Pragmatic Programmer

- jQuery in Action (b/c we are adding jQuery now)

Many good choices - Pragmatic Developer & Code Complete are 2 of my favorites....however I would start out a different way..."Dreaming in Code" - excellent story and easily relatable for most development teams

I would go for opinionated writers who write well and will stimulate interest and debate.

As such the first text that comes to my mind is Object Thinking by David West. An excellent and provocative text that is engaging, and very opinionated.

Wish someone would do this in the London area!

I think the most important thing is to make the books interesting to the majority of your team. What are your teams weak points? Maybe concentrate on those. Really the key is to make the planning a team activity not a disctatorship.

I do not recommend reading metaprogramming books for months. There are only so many books you can read about patterns, pming, etc before the value wears off.

Personally these books are indespensable to me and I highley recommend them (of you can see where my interest lies:):

A Developers Guide to SQL Server 2005

www.amazon.com/.../0321382188

Pro ASP.NET 3.5 Server Controls and AJAX Components (Pro)

www.amazon.com/.../ref=sr_1_6

Advanced ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls

www.amazon.com/.../0321514440

these is best for dummies or newpie

O'Really Head First Series(Java, C#, Design)

Now, I reading the The Definitive Guide to Microsoft Enterprise Library

My Next book list is

the code complete

design pattern in C#

Voila!  devlicio.us/.../standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants.aspx

I'll be controversial and suggest two non-development books that I used for a mandatory education program for my engineering teams at IBM:

How to Be a Star at Work  (crappy name awesome content) ISBN-10: 0812931696

The Innovator's Solution  ISBN-10: 1578518520

99% of the problem is not knowing the game or building the right product as opposed to building it well. And agile developers often still miss the boat having the wrong customers dictating the product decisions.

Finally for a book in our field, I think Eric Evans Domain-Driven Design ISBN-10: 0321125215 is a true eye opener that got me back on track with what I think the roots of OO really are as opposed to the language artifacts and derived IT designs that we practice.

If you are going the agile route, I suspect there will be little to differentiate architects from developers other than experience.

I would highly recommend DDD before the others on the theory it is incredible to unlearn bad habits compared to not having developed them before hand.

I think DDD would be a good match for About Face 2.0 ISBN-10: 0764526413 if you guys do any UI development.

And then the rest, I would put Refactoring ISBN-10: 0201485672 at the top of my pragmatic list before any Design Patterns or agile books because it really sets the context of both the possibilities and limitations of evolutionary design and design through development.

I sent you some tweets about this. After reading everyone else's comments, I'll just reiterate that Object Thinking by David West is "book club poison." Although I will again mention that I like the book.

(@Peter - didn't know you got around so much)

I think my short list would be something like this:

Prag. Prog.

Agile Principles Patterns and Practices

Clean Code

Refactoring

@Tim

No, I don't think it's a pipe dream at all. I have been trying hard to figure this stuff out, too. That is, how I can bring a group of devs to same level.

I would read the books I listed in the same order. PP gives you DRY, YAGNI, and a bunch of other good foundational...thought modes? APPP will give you the SOLID principles. This makes for a very good foundation I think.

Clean Code and Refactoring are very complimentary. These books will really help you simplify your classes. Refactoring had an especially profound effect on my coding style.

At this point, I think you would be at a place where everyone could write testable code effectively, so you could move on to some good TDD or design pattern books.

I think that combining a code dojo with a book club would even enhance what you are trying to do. I will be doing something similar very shortly so I will let you know if it works out.

in order of chronological reading, not importance, my short list would be

(If it was for a team)

Implementation patterns

Pragmatic programmers

PoEAA

DDD

if it was for a interested developer i would switch Code Complete for the Implemetation Patterns

Head First Design Patterns

DDD

Agile Principles Patterns and Practices

Working Effectively With Legacy Code

Refactoring

PoEAA

Code Complete

Analysis Patterns can be useful, esp if your problem domain falls under one of the covered topics

@Tim

My company buys the books and pays for the lunches that we have during the sessions. It's part of the training budget that we put into the yearly budget for the department. We buy 20 copies of whatever book we are doing, well in advance of that books' class actually starting.

depending on the chapter size, we typically limit to 1 chapter a week. for some of the larger DDD chapters, we split into two weeks, though. There were also a few Code Complete chapters that got doubled up because they were very small.

Tim

We have started a virtual book club with the book "Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#".  For more information you can go to the Austin Tech Book Club group on Google groups.google.com/.../austin-tech-book-club.

Anything Fowler certainly UML Distilled for all levels, even (especially!) newbies.  (Surprised that there are no references other than Billy McCafferty's post in the link above)!

Steve McConnell - Code Complete, RAD.

Gang of Four - Design Patterns n(again, few references to this...why?!?!?)

@Sean:

I think there are few references to GoF due to the fact it is so heavy weight. There are many pattern books BASED on GoF that are much easier to read and absorb for devs new to patterns. I have GoF but I dont recommend it too people new to patterns. Its too hard a read. (IMO)

Obviously with out it ther would not have been the more user friendly version like Head First etc

@Sean:

I think there are few references to GoF due to the fact it is so heavy weight. There are many pattern books BASED on GoF that are much easier to read and absorb for devs new to patterns. I have GoF but I dont recommend it too people new to patterns. Its too hard a read. (IMO)

Obviously with out it ther would not have been the more user friendly version like Head First etc

Book List:

Head First Design Patterns (Freeman, Freeman)

High Performance Web Sites (Souders)

Essential ASP.NET (Fritz Onion)

Study Method:

Each week assign one person to summarize a chapter. Each team member reads the chapter and contributes to the discussion.

Avoid:

Too much reading each week. People are busy. Learn in easy bit sized portions

Good Luck!

@RhysC - Thanks for the response.  I've never tried looking at many other pattern books other than Fowler and Gof...I'll give Head First, a go.  Anything that's clear and accessible is good!