I poked my head in the CIO's office on Friday and asked if I could buy some books. He told me "Sure." Then, "Don't go crazy." I assured him that I wouldn't. I'm pretty conservative about what I buy. In fact, since I hadn't had the go ahead to get books, I'd just been going to the bookstore and reading there.
Tonight I bought a couple of books. The first is a book I already had. Actually it isn't. I had the first edition, and this is the third. Unlike many revised editions of computer books which vary only where new features have been introduced to the specific software, this is practically a whole new book. This book though, is not about a specific software. Craig Larman's Applying UML and Patterns An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Iterative Development is for folks involved in more than single environment coding. "Analysis and design, defining how to solve the problem, what to program, capturing this design in ways that are easy to communicate, to review, to implement, and to evolve is what lies at the core of this book."
The other book I bought is the antithesis in style of the first. Head First Design Patterns is full of visual interest so as to avoid the soporific effects of books such as Larman's. This is a well reviewed intro to the major design patterns made famous by the gang of four (GoF) in 1994's Design Patterns. Design Patterns were introduced originally in architecture, but have been greedily adapted to other construction metaphors.
The only annoying thing about these two books is that they both use Java examples. Now Java's not that far from C# (which I read as "see pound" until I finally cracked a cover) but I'm barely a newbie to that language. In fact I really want a good C# book too, but I haven't done the research yet to find an appropriate one (or two). I'm beginning to be able to put names to the things I don't know, but there's lots of reading ahead.
Posted to Work Life at April 30, 2005 9:48 PMWhen I was doing work at the Big Insurance Group, we used Head First Java as one of the give-away texts for all mainframers being retrained in OOP. I really like the series but I suppose they vary from book to book. I always wondered why we had such divergent views on Applying UML.
Posted by: Forrest at May 2, 2005 10:53 AM