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Top 50 New Software Development Books

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Top 50 New Software Development Books

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Jurgen Appelo
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Mar. 04, 09 · Agile Zone ·
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It's been nine months since I created the Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books, Ever, with the best books ever released. I still refer to it when I want to pick up a timeless classic.

But last week I suddenly had the desire to know what the new best software development books are. And I couldn't find any such list. So, of course, I made it myself.

In this post I proudly present the Top 50 New Software Development Books, where new means "less than two years old". This list was created using a weighed mix of the following criteria:

  • Number of ratings on Amazon.com
  • Average rating on Amazon.com
  • Number of ratings on GoodReads.com
  • Averate rating on GoodReads.com

Note: The time that has passed since a book's release date was part of the calculation. For example: A book that got three 5-star ratings in just four months is listed higher than a book that got the same ratings in a much longer period of time.

Some other things worth pointing out:

  • Like in the previous edition, I ignored all technology-specific titles. Only books about generic software engineering topics were allowed on the list.
  • I discarded all re-releases of books that had earlier editions before 2007. The only exception is Making Things Happen, because Scott Berkun changed the title of his book. And because he's a nice bloke who granted an interview with me.
  • Thomas Erl is on this list three times (#6, #17, #24). He didn't pay me for that, unfortunately. He just did it all by himself.
  • Three books released in 2009 were already able to get listed here, which is quite an achievement: Agile Testing (#28), 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know (#33), and Scrumban (#49).
  • There are 22 books from 2007 on this list, 25 books from 2008, and 3 from 2009.
  • While making this list I drank 8 cups of coffee, and consumed a full bag of Belgian chocolates.
  • This must be the first list of mine where Steve McConnell is not listed.

I hope you will enjoy the results...

  Title / Author(s) Release
1 Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
Scott Rosenberg		 26-1-2007
2 Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
Robert C. Martin		 11-8-2008
3 Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware
Andy Hunt		 15-8-2008
4 Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager
Michael Lopp		 12-6-2007
5 Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think
Andy Oram, Greg Wilson		 26-6-2007
6 SOA Principles of Service Design
Thomas Erl		 28-7-2007
7 The Productive Programmer
Neal Ford		 3-7-2008
8 Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky's Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent
Joel Spolsky		 31-5-2007
9 Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management
Scott Berkun		 25-3-2008
10 Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software
Michael Nygard		 30-3-2007
11 The Art of Agile Development
James Shore, Shane Warden		 26-10-2007
12 Service-Oriented Modeling: Service Analysis, Design, and Architecture
Michael Bell		 25-2-2008
13 Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises
Dean Leffingwell		 8-3-2007
14 The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine
Charles Petzold		 16-6-2008
15 Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design
Bill Buxton		 11-4-2007
16 Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk
Paul Duvall, Steve Matyas, Andrew Glover		 9-7-2007
17 SOA Design Patterns
Thomas Erl		 23-10-2008
18 The Developer's Guide to Debugging
Thorsten Grötker, Ulrich Holtmann, Holger Keding, Markus Wloka		 11-8-2008
19 Agile Adoption Patterns: A Roadmap to Organizational Success
Amr Elssamadisy		 7-7-2008
20 Manage It!: Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
Johanna Rothman		 7-6-2007
21 The Principles of Project Management
Meri Williams		 13-3-2008
22 Introduction to Information Retrieval
Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan, Hinrich Schütze		 7-7-2008
23 Head First Software Development
Dan Pilone, Russ Miles		 11-1-2007
24 Web Service Contract Design and Versioning for SOA
Thomas Erl, Anish Karmarkar, Priscilla Walmsley		 21-9-2008
25 The Art of Multiprocessor Programming
Maurice Herlihy, Nir Shavit		 29-2-2008
26 Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum
Craig Larman, Bas Vodde		 22-12-2008
27 SOA in Practice: The Art of Distributed System Design
Nicolai M. Josuttis		 24-8-2007
28 Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams
Lisa Crispin, Janet Gregory		 5-1-2009
29 The Business Analyst's Handbook
Howard Podeswa		 4-11-2008
30 Scrum and XP from the Trenches
Henrik Kniberg		 4-10-2007
31 xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code
Gerard Meszaros		 31-5-2007
32 Applied SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture and Design Strategies
Michael Rosen, Boris Lublinsky, Kevin T. Smith, Marc J. Balcer		 13-6-2008
33 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know
Richard Monson-Haefel		 13-2-2009
34 Perfect Software: And Other Illusions about Testing
Gerald M. Weinberg		 29-8-2008
35 Expert Product Management: Advanced Techniques, Tips and Strategies for Product Management & Product Marketing
Brian Lawley		 10-10-2007
36 The Enterprise and Scrum
Ken Schwaber		 13-6-2007
37 Algorithms in a Nutshell
George Heineman, Gary Pollice, Stanley Selkow		 1-11-2008
38 The Software Project Manager's Bridge to Agility
Michele Sliger, Stacia Broderick		 29-5-2008
39 Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions
Bill Scott, Theresa Neil		 15-1-2008
40 If I Only Changed the Software, Why is the Phone on Fire?
Lisa K. Simone		 23-3-2007
41 Puzzles for Programmers and Pros
Dennis Shasha		 7-5-2007
42 Managing the Test People
Judy McKay		 27-4-2007
43 Practical Project Initiation: A Handbook with Tools
Karl E. Wiegers		 8-8-2007
44 Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises
Roger Sessions		 19-5-2008
45 How We Test Software at Microsoft
Alan Page, Ken Johnston, Bj Rollison		 16-8-2008
46 The One Page Project Manager for IT Projects
Clark A. Campbell		 4-8-2008
47 The Art of Lean Software Development: A Practical and Incremental Approach
Curt Hibbs, Steve Jewett, Mike Sullivan		 15-12-2008
48 Code Leader: Using People, Tools, and Processes to Build Successful Software
Patrick Cauldwell		 5-5-2008
49 Scrumban - Essays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development
Corey Ladas		 12-1-2009
50 Software Requirement Patterns
Stephen Withall		 13-6-2007

The book Getting Results from Software Development Teams from Lawrence J. Peters (8-6-2008) would have been #51. But alas, I have to stop somewhere...

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