Hot off the Presses

Instead of your (semi) regularly scheduled post, I’d like to mark something of a milestone today. As a child, I was pretty sure I had it figured out. I was going to write science fiction novels for money and alternate between roaming around the world and living in the woods. I’m not sure exactly where I went wrong, but somehow I got slightly off course and wound up roaming the country, living in legacy code bases and fleeing from people waving Gantt charts. But, all is not lost — I now have two printed, published books to my name.

Links to 3 E-Books have appeared on the right-hand side of my site for a while now, but 2 of them are now available in print. So you can go to Amazon, order, and receive a real, bonafide, bound, glossed and printed book that I wrote. Or two.

Here they are.

Starting to Unit Test: Not as Hard as You Think

This book is more or less what you would expect, given the title. It assumes that you’re a developer who’d like to have some experience writing automated unit tests. But… you don’t know where to begin. The book invites you to relax and assures you that it won’t be so bad to learn if you set yourself up for success.  It also might be a great thing to slide casually to people on your team that can’t seem to break themselves of the habit of writing legacy code in real time.

If you’d like a copy, here’s the Link to Amazon

The Expert Beginner

This is the synthesis and refinement of a series of popular posts I made some time back. It’s about the unfortunate journey that some people in the tech world take from novice to “not very good, but I was the first one here so now you have to listen to the dumb stuff I tell you.” Somewhat cynical on the surface, it really underscores what I perceive to be a muted, industry-wide tragedy but one from which recovery is certainly possible.

If you’d like a copy, here’s the Link to Amazon

Enjoy, and for those of you hoping for the next Chess TDD post, it’s in the works.  I have some of the video for the next one, but it needs audio.