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Jurgen Appelo is a writer, speaker, trainer, entrepreneur, illustrator, developer, manager, blogger, reader, dreamer, leader, freethinker, and… Dutch guy. Since 2008 Jurgen writes a popular blog at www.noop.nl, that covers topics including Agile management, software engineering, business improvement, personal development, and complexity theory. He is the author of the book Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders, which describes the role of the manager in Agile organizations. And he wrote the little book How to Change the World, which describes his new supermodel for change management. He is also a speaker who is regularly invited to talk at business seminars and conferences around the world. Jurgen is co-founder of the Agile Lean Europe network (for Agile & Lean thinkers and practitioners in Europe) and the Stoos Network (focusing on change agents for organizational transformation). After studying Software Engineering at the Delft University of Technology, and earning his Master’s degree in 1994, Jurgen Appelo has busied himself starting up and leading a variety of Dutch businesses, always in the position of team leader, manager, or executive. Jurgen has experience in leading a horde of 100 software developers, development managers, project managers, business consultants, quality managers, service managers, and kangaroos, some of which he hired accidentally. Nowadays he works full-time developing innovative courseware, books, and other types of original content. But sometimes Jurgen puts it all aside to do some programming himself, or to spend time on his ever-growing collection of science fiction and fantasy literature, which he stacks in a self-designed book case. It is 4 meters high. Jurgen lives in Rotterdam (The Netherlands) -- and in Brussels (Belgium) -- with his partner Raoul. He has two kids, and an imaginary hamster called George. Jurgen is a DZone MVB and is not an employee of DZone and has posted 126 posts at DZone. You can read more from them at their website. View Full User Profile

Top 50 New Software Development Books

03.04.2009
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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...

References
Reference: 
Top 50 New Software Development Books
Published at DZone with permission of Jurgen Appelo, author and DZone MVB. (source)

(Note: Opinions expressed in this article and its replies are the opinions of their respective authors and not those of DZone, Inc.)

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