2013 Favorite Books

I enjoyed writing up a post about my favorite books at the end of last year so I thought it would be fun to do it again. Maybe I will turn this into an annual event. This year I managed to read 21 books and 14 research papers. Note these are not affiliate links and I will get absolutely nothing if you click on them.

Favorite Books 2013

• SOA with REST - This book does a great job of mapping the REST architectural style to SOA patterns. It demonstrates how to build SOA solutions using REST for the implementation.
• Building Hypermedia APIs with HTML 5 and Node - Don’t let the title fool you. This book is full of lots of great information on building APIs with hypermedia. I don’t know (and don’t care) much about Node.js and I didn’t have any trouble following the code samples.
• SOA Patterns - This book is nice collection of SOA patterns and anti-patterns. I like the fact that the patterns are described in a way that isn’t specific to a single technology stack.
• Practical Project Initiation - While I am a technologist and not a project manager I still found some great tips on how to start a project off on the right foot.
• Bad Data Handbook - This is collection of essays on data problems and how to work around them. A couple of the scenarios presented were things I have experienced in my own projects.
• Dune - This was my fun reading for the year. I read all six of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels. Overall I enjoyed the story though it gets a little preachy towards the end of the series.

For 2014 I hope to get into Big Data and some related subjects like functional programming. I have been taking advantage of the holiday sales to stock up on books to read in the coming year. Until then.