Books I have read most recently

January 19, 2004  FILED TO: Technical

Yes, they’re mostly techie recently – that’s actually unusual for me but I’ve got a lot of learning to do. I may make a list out of these and make it sticky.

• Pragmatic Programmer (Hunt/Thomas) – Old but some good tips that still apply
• French for Dummies – Pourquoi? Because I am going to Tahiti! Je suis excité!
• Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object Oriented Design (Shalloway/Trott) - Good introduction / aid to understanding design patterns and how they relate to OO
• JUnit in Action (Massol) – Really great book, even though I’ve been doing JUnit testing (TDD) for a while. Covers JUnit well (and even occurrances of design patterns), tools that junit integrates with (Eclipse, Ant, Maven), mock (how to but also EasyMock, Dynamock, MockMaker, MockObjects), and then goes on to testing strategies (covers UI, persistence / jdbc, EJB, custom tags). Highly recommended.
• The Woman with the Alabastar Jar (Starbird) - Covers research and hypothises into Mary Magdalene and suggests that she may be the wife of Jesus and the mother of his child from which the Merovingian line came and that she, as the carrier of the rightful king’s line, is the Holy Grail. Very interesting. Builds on the research by the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail which I have also read recently and found compelling.
• Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Leigh, Lincoln, Baigent) – No words can describe this book.
• The DaVinci Code (Brown) - Excellent novel. They’re making a film about it. What got me interested in the Grail / Prieure de Sion / Mary Magdalene etc.
• Angels & Demons (Brown) – Another excellent novel by the master.