2014 Favorite Books

I am a little late with my favorite books list for 2014, but better late than never. Right? Unfortunately I did not get to read as many books as would have liked this past year. Last Year I mentioned I wanted to get into Big Data but that did not happen as planned. Instead I spent my reading time learning about APIs and distributed systems. As always, none of the links below are affiliate links. I link directly to the publisher for ebooks and to Amazon for paper books as that is where I make my own purchases.

Favorite Books 2014

  • RESTful Web APIs - This is the first book I have read on REST APIs that provided practical advice on building services using hypermedia.
  • Designing Evolvable Web APIs with ASP.NET - Similar to the previous title, this book provides lots of practical advice for building hypermedia APIs using the ASP.NET Web API framework.
  • Understanding Computation - I have not read anything on the theory of computation or language design since I was in school. I really enjoy this book as it provides a nice introduction and review of those two topics and presents them in a way that does not require a computer science degree to understand.
  • Lean from the Trenches - This book was all about practical advice on using Lean principles to manage software projects. I really like the way the author uses retrospectives on a real project as the examples to show what works and what does not.

The list is a little short this year. I hope to get back into my normal reading groove for 2015.