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Books I'm trying to read right now

Authors

I have so many books I need to read right now, it isn’t even funny. In my office at home, I’ve got about 8+ books which I need to read, and the majority haven’t even been started yet.

One of them is Martin Fowler’s Refactoring, which I’m really looking forward to. I’ve started ASP.NET MVP Hacks, which is pretty good. I’m only up to chapter 3 or 4, but I’ve already seen a decent overview of the provider model that ASP.NET uses.

At work, John Robbins’ Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0 Applications and Bruce Payette’s Windows PowerShell in Action are sitting on my desk. I haven’t yet started the PowerShell book yet, but I’ve gotten a little ways into the debugging book.

I just read a funny story that John Robbins provides in his debugging book about having what-if sessions during the project planning phase. He notes that in his prior job as a member of the Green Berets, they would have what-if sessions to plan for any and all contingencies. They’re lives were on the line after all.

He pointed out that, after moving to software development, he could get his development team really uncomfortable by asking what-if questions like, “what if Bob dies before we get through the requirements phase.” I’ll have to remember to ask some “what-if-death” questions at my next team meeting…