Book Recommendations

I learn most of the things in technology and in life by reading books written by awesome people. This category is my way of helping them to spread their documented insights.

Books that helped me understood Java and became proficient in it

The Java programming language had opened up a lot of opportunities for me ever since I was acquainted with it. Most people say that learning Java is easy, however mastering it is hard. For me, mastering Java could have been harder if not for some of the books that I had read. In this post, I list some of the books that had taught me a great deal of Java, so much so that I am able to be proficient with it.

Books that helped me understood how to add some JavaScript to my website

The books that teach me the concepts and skills that I need to build my website is enough for me to have a personal space on the Internet. However, I had to add interactivity to my website and web applications at work in order to make them more interesting. This post lists some of the books which I had read to get Javascript into my toolbox.

Books that prepared me well for my Java Programmer and Java Developer certifications

Back in the days when I was still a student, I found some motivation to pursue the Java Programmer and Java Developer certifications. As a student, I did not have the extra cash to pay for the Java preparation courses provided by education institutions which were marketed to increase the chances of students passing the the exams required to earn the Java Programmer and Java Developer certifications. As such, I chose to go the cheaper route of reading books that I could find in the market back then.

This post lists the books that I had used to prepare myself for the Java Programmer and Java Developer certifications from Sun Microsystems.

Books that taught me the concepts and skills that I needed to build my website

When I had that spark of motivation to build a website for myself, I do not know how to get started.

At that point of time, I found myself lacking in the following skills to:

  • design my website
  • create codes for the browser to render the front end look and feel
  • create codes for the web server to respond to HTTP requests from the browser
  • write some decent content for my website

This post lists the books that help me understood the concepts that I needed and acquired the skills that I needed to fulfill my motivation of building my website.

Some resources that I reference(d) for producing things on the web

A good colleague of mine had asked me whether I could recommend him some learning resources in the area of web production. Yes, there are wonderful resources that I came across in my pursuit to put up useful things to people in the least frustrating way.

This post is for good people like him who want to learn more about producing things on the web.

100 things every designer needs to know about people

Although a 100 things seem a lot to read and learn, this 200 plus page book is definitely an easy read. “100 things every designer needs to know about people” contains nicely structured paragraphs and ample images to convey psychological concepts on human behaviour. In fact, this book itself is actually designed with these concepts in mind!

Managed to finish this book while commuting, waiting and putting myself out of programming loops for a while.

Shall post my thoughts about this book in this post. 🙂

My thoughts on “Head First Design Patterns”

Cover page of Head First Design Patterns

Many software projects fail because of their programmers having the “just produce the code” mentality. Indeed, the motivation of design patterns is to give programmers a suite of techniques to isolate areas of changes, so that changes become less painful when a bug occurs or when customers demand more functionality out of the software. Personally, before picking up this book, I had learnt design patterns through goggling and piecing up different fragments of knowledge. However, I feel that I need more assurance in order to pioneer the development of a software project.