Derek’s Diary

Did you know that Grande Bibliothèque (BAnQ) provides Québec residents with free access to Safari Books Online? This service lists books for online reading from publishers such as Addison-Wesley, No Starch, O’Reilly, Peachpit, Prentice Hall PTR, Que, and Sams. I found a few Ruby related O’Reilly titles that I recognized:

• RJS Templates for Rails
• Ruby Cookbook
• Ruby on Rails: Up and Running
• Web Services on Rails

Though the Grande Bibliothèque Safari subscription allows you to search all books and read any book online, unlike a regular Safari subscription, it does not allow you to download individual book chapters for offline reading.

A few weeks ago, I finished reading Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects from The Pragmatic Programmers. Drawn from the authors’ numerous years of experience developing software at SAS Software, Ship It! is a book full of advice, tips, and techniques that can help managers and developers alike improve their software development process. The book examines software development from three interrelated perspectives: infrastructure, techniques, and process. In particular, it discusses the iterative and agile Tracer Bullet software development process.

Two important lessons that I learned from Ship It! is that I should perform more code reviews and automated testing!

Other Ship It! reviews:

• Javaddicts
• Shahay’s Perspectives
• TechBookReport
• UKUUG

Modernizing my less-than-dynamic book reading history, I’ll now be posting the titles of the books that I read here, on my weblog. Occasionally, I may accompany each bibliographic entry with a brief book review.

In addition to using my blog to track my book reading history, I’m contemplating posting it to The Library Thing.