Consumed

While most REST concepts are rather easy to grok, there is one concept which I found harder to understand at first: Hypermedia. Let it be that without this concept, you’re missing out on an extremely important strength of REST. Hypermedia enables you to build dumb - or smart, depending on your perspective - clients, which are mostly driven by the server. Practically, this is implemented as resources embedding links which allow the client to discover and navigate through your RESTful service. ...

While I have - obviously - read the Agile Manifesto before, and regularly click through to articles on agile, I had never read an extensive work on it. Browsing for a good book, I was advised by a peer to get The Art of Agile Development. I wholeheartedly believe in the Agile Manifesto, but somewhere along the way Agile - with a capital A - got somewhat of a bad rep. The authors of this book, James Shore and Shane Warden, already predicted this five years ago. Throughout the book, I never had the feeling they were connected to the Agile mob, but just genuinely care about working software. ...

According to Matt from 37signals the line “Sent from my iPhone” at the bottom of an email means this: Let’s be honest. “Sent from my iPhone” really means “I’m not going to bother to proofread and correct this because it would take me an extra 30 seconds.” I agree. I too use this line as an excuse to write a terse message and omit proper salutations. However, I also think these four simple words greatly helped the viral growth of the mobile phone. Having early adopters brag about how they’re sending emails from their fancy new phone must have been an invaluable form of word-of-mouth advertising. ...

It’s been a while since I wrote my last book review, mostly because I’m still trying to figure out when it adds value to write one. For this one it was pretty obvious, there are far too little reviews out there. Being new to NHibernate, and NHibernate being known as having a steep learning curve, I thought it would be a good idea to do some reading. Searching for books on NHibernate 3.0 on Amazon only yielded three results: NHibernate 3 beginner’s guide, NHibernate 3.0 cookbook and working with NHibernate 3.0. None of these books have a decent amount of reviews, so I had to pick judging by the cover and summary. I chose the last one. ...

I think The Art of Unit Testing targets a broad audience. Beginners will find every part of the book useful, where intermediates might be more interested in the final two parts. Roy Osherove starts this book by laying a solid foundation of the unit testing concept. Why is testing important? What defines a good unit test, and how does a unit test differ from an integration test? In the second part of the book, he demonstrates the use of two core unit testing techniques: stubs and mocks. After showing you how these techniques work, he shows off various isolation frameworks which can help you creating stubs and mocks at runtime (fakes), greatly reducing the effort of writing these objects. ...

I was lucky to pick up a copy of More Joel on Software for only 5 euros at a bookfest last week. Turns out the book ships pretty cheap on Amazon as well. More Joel on Software was written by Joel Spolsky, already a legend for launching The Stack Exchange Network with Jeff Atwood. Although it’s hard to not know him, I admittedly hadn’t read a lot of his material so far. Starting my professional career in late 2008, the Spolsky writing high days were mostly over. ...

This Christmas, my girlfriend and I got this little book called It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be. This book is mainly directed to (advertisement) designers, but since I feel that designers and developers do have a few things in common, we both like to create things, I also read it. The content of this book is a collection of Paul Ardens observations on business and life presented in a very consumable format. As it turns out, although I am not part of the target audience, a good amount of his thoughts can be applied to software development as well. ...

As a technology geek, it should be hard to keep ignoring the latest generation of eReaders (read: the Kindle). With over three million devices sold, the Kindle has proven that it adds value to people’s lives, and that it’s a lot more than just a gadget. Some of the most obvious benefits… You can carry a whole library in your backpack. The price of an eBook often is substantially less than the hardcover version. I am far from a Green, but I can’t neglect the fact that no trees need to be chopped down to print an eBook. Reading a 1000+ page book in bed or next to the pool is the opposite of convenient. ...

The book The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World was written by Chris Guillebeau. I learned about this book through Chris’ blog. He hosts a very popular blog where he writes on lifehacking, entrepreneurship and his goal to travel to each country in the world. In this book Chris tries to show the reader that you don’t have the live your life the way other people expect you to. As long as you are open to new ideas, are dissatisfied with the status quo and are willing to work hard, you should be able to live the life of your dreams. ...

I rarely review books with non-technical content here, but I just felt like I had to with this one. The book Got Fight? was written by Forrest Griffin, assisted by Erich Krauss. Forrest Griffin is one of the toughest light-heavyweight mixed martial artists competing in the UFC. If you are unfamiliar with MMA and UFC, I encourage you to watch one of the Forrest Griffin tribute videos on Youtube. This book touches several subjects. Forrest talks about the path he followed to become a professional fighter and what made him who he is today. Forrest also shares a bunch of advice on fighting and non-fighting topics. The last part of the book contains a series of how-to MMA techniques. All these topics are talked together in the form of hilarious, and sometimes offending (to some of you), ramblings. After all, the main goal to read this book shouldn’t be to learn, but to be entertained, and maybe learn something along the way! ...