Book Publishers Addison-Wesley Apress John Wiley McGraw-Hill Computing Microsoft Press Mike Murach O'Reilly QUE Publishing Sams Publishing Wrox Press

Books On‑Line Amazon Amazon.ca Barnes & Noble Barnes & Noble.ca Chapters Indigo

Best Practices

Code Complete Rapid Development Software Project Survival Guide by Steve McConnell For those of you interested in real-world guide to best software practices, more efficient applications development or valuable tips on controlling the development schedules, there are several books by Steve McConnell providing great advice and tips.  Code Complete is a practical handbook of software construction that includes best software  practices and ready-to-use checklists to help you assess your design and code quality.  Rapid Development addresses issues related to getting the high-pressure development schedules under control and keeping your projects moving in the right direction.  Software Project Survival Guide will help you make sure that your first important project isn't your last one with software development strategies that work pretty well most of the time for most projects.

Software Requirements by Karl Wiegers Software Requirements provides a comprehensive and practical guide about gathering, refining, implementing, and eventually tracking software requirements..  It shows you how to define and get more out of software requirements with dozens of "best practices" and tips that will help you communicate with your customer, document your requirements, and track and manage them. What makes this book a valuable resource for both software project managers and developers is that the author offers feasible solutions that could be easily implemented in real life scenarios.  It is no surprise that the author won a Software Productivity Award for his work.

Object-Oriented Design, Patterns & UML

	Design Patterns by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson & John Vlissides Design Patterns is a modern classic in the literature of object-oriented development, offering timeless and elegant solutions to common problems in software design. It describes patterns for managing object creation, composing objects into larger structures, and coordinating control flow between objects. The book provides numerous examples where using composition rather than inheritance can improve the reusability and flexibility of code. Note, though, that it's not a tutorial but a catalog that you can use to find an object-oriented design pattern that's appropriate for the needs of your particular application--a selection for virtuoso programmers who appreciate (or require) consistent, well-engineered object-oriented designs.
	Applying UML and Patterns by Craig Larman This book provides well written and comprehensive review of software development processes and best practices, UML and design patterns. Overall, the book makes a good reading for experienced developers and newcomers alike by providing the big picture on how Use Case, UML, Patterns and Unified Process can compliment one another. The book is very effective in teaching the reader how to “think in objects” by giving a real-world example throughout the chapters. All case study iterations and skills are presented in the context of an “agile” version of the Unified Process - a popular, modern iterative approach to software development.
	UML Distilled, 3rd edition by Martin Fowler The third edition of Martin Fowler's bestselling UML Distilled provides updates to the Unified Modeling Language (UML) without changing its basic formula for success. It is still arguably the best resource for quick, no-nonsense explanations of using UML. The major strength of UML Distilled is its short, concise presentation of the essentials of UML and where it fits within today's software development process. The book describes all the major UML diagram types, what they're for, and the basic notation involved in creating and deciphering them. These diagrams include use cases; class and interaction diagrams; collaborations; and state, activity, and physical diagrams. The examples are always clear, and the explanations cut to the fundamental design logic.

Beginners VB.NET

Murach's Beginning Visual Basic .NET by Anne Prince All the material in the book is presented in a clear and concise manner with many practical code samples.  The first seven chapters use a step-by-step approach that lets you set your own pace.  The book includes a number of simple business applications to illustrate programming in the real world.

SQL & ADO

SQL Server 2000 Stored Procedure & XML Programming by Dejan Sunderic Discover the key concepts, techniques, tips, and tricks professional developers need to know in order to take full advantage of stored procedures in the SQL Server environment. Everything that you need for stored procedure development - from naming conventions to methods to deploy changes in production. One of the best book on the market for the SQL Server developers of all levels.

.NET Development

Visual Basic .NET Business Objects by Rockford Lhotka This book is one of the best book available on n-tier architected solutions using .NET. It contains the author's Component-based, Scalable, Logical Architecture (CSLA), an object-oriented framework that can act as the foundation for a diverse range of enterprise applications, and which you're free to examine, use, and modify for your needs. The author does a great job of explaining what he was trying to accomplish and the various design trade-offs that he encountered and how and why he chose to address each of them.  In addition to the book, there are active discussions online at www.lhotka.net on solving real problems using his solution.