Although I started with Cold Fusion for application development, I did plenty brochureware sites with HTML. I believe the version was HTML 2.0 for IE 2.0. I lived in the browser world for years doing Cold Fusion, ASP, and HTML sites. When winforms and Smart Client with Web Services eme...

I highly recommend this book to any role involved with developing .NET software. I personally do not find software development an art form. It is not an unpredictable activity driven by crazy business users that come to work every day inventing a new way to operate their businesses j...

I personally do not find software development an art form. It is not an unpredictable activity driven by crazy business users that come to work every day inventing a new way to operate their businesses just to savagely changing your requirements. Project teams that use changing require...

Perfect for those people looking to get into WPF, Silverlight, or XAML for Windows (Windows 8) development. I have read a lot of the WPF and Silverlight books out there and there are some good ones. The difference I find with this book is that it is XAML centric so the scope is more i...

I still remember the first time I was on a project that used NAnt and CruiseControl.NET. It was years ago and both were new tools with plenty of bugs. The project manager took one of the team's architects and dedicated him to getting CI up and running. I didn't work with him for anothe...

This is a very well put together book. It includes a single example company that the book grows and changes throughout the book. Sometimes examples get on my nerves. They are either too lightweight to mean anything, or sometimes too complex, and end up distracting you to the point of n...

This book is not only about DI, it is about proper object oriented programming. Every .NET architect and developer should read this book. Sometimes my ability to be a complete ignoramus really annoys me. When I first saw this book on the upcoming list of books to be published I thoug...

If you are in IT, I highly recommend reading this book. There are not too many systems being created today that I would consider more than interfaces to a data structure. Meaning most systems today rely on people to provide the intelligence behind them. The systems themselves are vie...

It’s quite clear from reading this book that Peter Gasston is very knowledgeable about CSS 3 and, as he points out in the preface, this book is a culmination of five years of work that he has spent writing about CSS3. There is a clear order to the chapters. The earlier chapters are wel...

This book will take you to the next level of using SharePoint and Silverlight together. I can say that it did that for me. I have done a lot of SharePoint custom development and I see Silverlight as the answer to the horrible web part programming model Microsoft has made available in...

All in all if you are considering Windows 7.5 development you owe it to yourself to get this book, digest it, and then keep it by your side. This book starts with a great introduction to the Windows phones. It introduces Metro design language, hardware specifications, input patterns, ...

This book is great for the SharePoint end user. I kind of think of it like the top 70 FAQs about SharePoint found all in one place. Although this book is a little out of context for the books I usually read about SharePoint, I was looking for a book to recommend to the user's of the S...

Data integration is a complex, detailed, sometimes excruciating boring activity, that is not an activity for the light at heart. This book does a great job of digging into the details of the data transformations. It is not just a high level look at data integration, it gets into the ...

All in all I highly recommend this book as a learning resource for Java.  It covers a ton of topics and covers them in detail with plenty of examples.  I would expect to find this in any good Java programmer's library. I have had several Deitel books in the past and I would say my big...

It is a must read for anyone out there claiming to be running an agile enterprise. I still remember the first few pages of Managing Software Requirements: A Unified Approach (The Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series). I was in BWI waiting on my daughter's flight to arrive. The book...

This is a well-written book that meets the stated goals of its author: “The target audience for this book is the beginning C# programmer who wants to gain a foundation in object-oriented programming along with C# language basics.” This book works on a lot of different levels. It gives ...

The best thing about this book is that each subject is truly the actions and insights that give the most understanding with the least investment. I have been a fan of the Net Objectives books since the first edition of Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented De...

This is the second edition of one of the best books written on software systems architecture. If you are in the software development industry, you should read this book. If you are a Software Architect, you must read this book. Some might look at my book collection and think I have ho...

This book ended up being half the size it was advertised at when I pre-ordered it back in September. Amazon was kind enough to make up for it. I thank them. The author and the publisher also apologized for the miscalculation. Although it is small this book gets 5 out of 5 stars. I rec...

I bought this book to find out what the latest project management best practices are. I am not a project manager but as an architect I find I am usually managing a project and the team assigned to it. More often than not, a real project manager is not available. I bought this book to...

"Expert Cookbook" are the last two words in the title for a good reason. This book is for the advanced SharePoint developer. The book is a collection of small recipes that dig into some of the more advanced SharePoint 2010 programming topics. It does not mess around with introductions ...

I highly recommend it to anyone looking to learn Scrum and wants to use the TFS tool set to enable your team to accomplish your mission. I own the first version of this book and was looking forward to the second version. I would say if you want to get familiar with doing Scrum with TF...

This is the time to start learning about Microsoft's Master Data Services and this book is a great place to start. With the release of Denali we will be getting some nice improvements to the MDS toolset. We will be getting Excel tools that interface with the data, an excel add in that ...

This is a very hands-on book. It walks you through using every aspect of the current MDS tools. It starts out with an introduction to Master Data Services and then jumps right into installation and configuration. You then create an MDS Project and add a new Model to it by hand. The ...

Being primarily an architect and developer my use of Blend can be very limited at times. I use Blend mostly for prototyping with SketchFlow and I wanted to get a refresher on the functionality I don’t use day to day. Over the past several months I have been cracking this book open ove...

This is the last book in the Enterprise Engineering Series I had to read. It covers a ton of topics and covers them in-depth. The book starts out with a nice introduction to the author's point of view regarding Enterprise Engineering and Enterprise Governance. It then continues wit...

This is the perfect book for the beginner and the advanced MVC developer. It is a one stop shop for learning the ASP.NET MVC 3 Framework. It starts out with a nice little sample application that will get beginners up to speed fast. It then covers the MVC Pattern in detail and how it r...

All in all I highly recommend this to anyone just getting started with EF as well as anyone experienced with EF. This is rock solid coverage of the Entity Framework 4.0. It does not include coverage, beyond a small mention, of EF 4.1 (code first and DbContext API) or the June CTP rele...

This is a well rounded introduction to Enterprise Architecture. It covers all the basics in depth and also provides a really nice example to show you the results of Enterprise Architecting. After reading Architecture Principles and Enterprise Architecture at Work I decided I would al...

This book is a must read for anyone considering moving into parallel programming with the .NET Framework. This is a book of patterns that achieve potential parallelism. It is very important concept that all developers should have a decent grasp on. The patterns teach you how to write ...

Architecture Principles are described in this book as the cornerstones in Enterprise Architecture and it definitely shows you why this is true. My first look at his book was in PDF format. My friend let me borrow his copy. I liked it so much I printed it and put it in a three ring bin...

If you want to learn how to do Enterprise Architecture modeling, this book is for you. The book covers the Archimate language in detail. The book starts off with a nice introduction to Enterprise Architecture. It explains the internal and external drivers and then goes on to introduce...

One of the things I like the most about the book is that the author really shows you how to take advantage of existing tools and libraries that are intended to be used for code generation. When it comes to code generation I have seen the worst of the worst and some really cool impleme...

No matter what your technology stack is this book can help you implement an Enterprise Information Architecture or at least it will help you improve the one you have in place now. This book is a mature book on Enterprise Information Architecture. By mature I mean thorough and packed w...

CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) models are the product of the industry’s best coming together to build a collection of best practices that help organizations to improve their processes. The version 1.3 core framework now supports CMMI for Services, CMMI for Development, a...

So I had all the technical how to books, and some of them covered some governance and planning, but I was left wanting more. I hoped this book would fill in the gaps and it did. The biggest problem I have run into with SharePoint is that there is not enough planning and governance sur...

This is still my number one choice in UML books to have at my side. The first version of this book made it to everyone of my gigs in the past, now it is this versions turn. The first thing I imagine I should address is why the heck I am reviewing a book that is over 5 years old. I hav...

Another Unleashed behemoth!!! It is a whopping 1550 of printed pages and 2451 pages when you include the additional chapters available on the companion CD. If this book doesn’t contain the information you need about SQL Server 2008 R2, then you probably won’t find it anywhere. Just li...

If you are in anyway involved with Windows Server 2008 R2, you owe it to yourself to get this book. It will not leave my side!!!! This thing is gargantuan. It is a whopping 1653 pages of high quality Windows Server R2 information. If this book doesn’t contain the information you need...

If you are a business analyst, DBA, or software architect this book is mandatory reading. When I first started reading this book I became discouraged because it seemed as thought the author had bastardized UML. As I read on it became apparent that the author had merely created a DSL (...