2012 Favorite Books

As we are waiting to count down the arrival of 2013, I figured I would
review some of the favorite books I read this past year. Most of the
reading I do these days is technical, but I do make time for some fun
books as well. I read a grand total of 21 books in 2012 along with some
research papers and periodicals. Here is the short list of my favorites.
Please note, I do not have an any referral accounts, so I will
personally get nothing if you click on these links.

Favorite Books 2012

• RESTful Web Services - The grandfather of REST books. I finally
  picked up a copy of this for myself and found a lot of good
  information about building REST services.
• The REST API Design Handbook - This book is built on the
  author’s experience building REST APIs and contains a lot of
  practical advice on implementing REST.
• Designing Hypermedia APIs - Steve Klabnik’s ebook is still
  being written, but what is there is pretty solid.
• Just Enough Software Architecture: A Risk-Driven Approach - This
  book is easily the best book on software architecture I have read.
  The author uses a risk-based approach to determine how much
  architecture and design is needed for a given project.
• Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software - This
  book covers all the things you should be thinking about to make your
  software easier to deploy and manage. Remember, getting to “feature
  complete” is only half the battle.
• C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet,
  Perelandra, That Hideous Strength) - I have been a big fan
  of The Chronicles of Narnia since I was kid so I wanted to read C.S.
  Lewis’ science fiction series.

Thanks to all the holiday sale offers by my favorite technical book
publishers, I already have a number of books in the queue for me to read
in 2013. I will have to try and remember to do one of these lists next
year.