Agile SCM 2005 Book Reflections and Recommendations

I just finished writing my article for the December 2005 CMCrossroads Journal entitled Agile SCM 2005 - Reflecting back on the year in books. An excerpt follows ...

Hello! My name is Brad Appleton, and I'm a book-a-holic! Hear my serenity prayer:

Lord, please grant me ...
the serenity to accept that I can't read everything,
the time to read and understand everything that I can,
the wisdom to know the difference
    [so I won't have to leave my estate to Amazon.com],
and a sufficiently well-read network of friends
    [to tell me all about the books they've read].

We thought 2005 was a pretty gosh darn great year for Agile and Software CM alike. We wanted to share what we feel are some of the timeless classics that we have most looked to throughout the year, as well as the new books in the last year that we have been most impressed with.

Those of you reading this are encouraged to read the article to see what we had to say about some of the following books (as well as several others):

• Mario Moreira's Software Configuration Management Implementation Roadmap
• The 2nd edition of Brian White's outstanding Software Configuration Management Strategies and Rational ClearCase, updated by David Bellagio and Tom Milligan
• The Build Master, by Vincent Maraia
• Practical Perforce by Laura Wingerd
• Pragmatic Version Control with Subversion (by Mike Mason), and Bill Nagel's Subversion Version Control


• Sanjiv Augustine's Managing Agile Projects
• Mike Cohn's Agile Estimating and Planning
• Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns and Practices by Robert C. Martin
• Lean Software Development, by Tom and Mary Poppendieck
• Agile Management for Software Engineering by David Anderson


• Tom DeMarco's PeopleWare, Waltzing with Bears and Slack
  
• Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects, by Jared Richardson and Will Gwaltney
• Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management, by Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby


• Chad Fowler's My Job Went to India (And All I Got Was This Lousy Book): 52 Ways to Save Your Job
• Mike Clark's Pragmatic Project Automation
• Peter Scott's Perl Medic: Transforming Legacy Code


• Code Complete (2nd ed.), by Steve McConnell
• The Laws of Software Process, by Phil Armour
• The Ascent of Man, by Jacob Bronowski

Happy Holidays and Hopeful New Years!
A Very Happy Merry ChristmaHannaValiRamaKwanzaakah (or non-denominational solstice celebration) to all in 2005! And looking forward to what 2006 will bring to all of us in the coming year!