GOTO - Today, Tomorrow and the Future

18 Book Recommendations for the Holidays

December 24, 2021 Various GOTO Speakers Season 1 Episode 41
GOTO - Today, Tomorrow and the Future
18 Book Recommendations for the Holidays
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

These book recommendations were put together from GOTO Book Club authors and interviewers.
http://gotopia.tech/bookclub

DESCRIPTION
The holiday season is the perfect time to take a step back, relax and read a book, so we asked past authors and interviewers from GOTO Book Club to share the books that they would either give or want to receive as a gift. Watch this episode for a wide selection of more than 30 recommended titles covering software development and more.

Eoin Woods - Co-Author of "Continuous Architecture in Practice"
Fabio Pereira - Author of "Digital Nudge" & Head of Open Innovation Labs in Latin America at Red Hat
Dave Farley - Continuous Delivery & DevOps Pioneer, Award-winning Author, Founder & Director of Continuous Delivery Ltd.
Kevlin Henney - Co-Author of "97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know"
Phil Winder - Author of "Reinforcement Learning" & CEO of Winder.AI
Preben Thorø - CTO at Trifork Switzerland
Sven Johann - Senior Consultant at INNOQ and Podcast Host at CaSE
Mike Amundsen - Author of "Design and Build Great Web APIs"
Saša Jurić - Author of "Elixir in Action"
Jim Webber - Co-Author of "Graph Databases"
Trisha Gee - Co-Author of "97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know"
Raymond Camden - Co-Author of "The Jamstack Book" & Developer Evangelist for Adobe
Adam Tornhill - Author of "Software Design X-Rays" and Founder & CTO at CodeScene
Linda Rising - Author of various books & Computer Software Consultant and Professional
Matt Turner - SRE at Marshall Wace
Richard Feldman - Author of "Elm in Action"
Erik Schön - Author of "The Art of Strategy"
Casey Rosenthal - Co-Author of "Chaos Engineering"
James Wickett - Founder of Open Source Project Gauntlt

Download slides and read the full abstract here:
https://gotopia.tech/bookclub/episodes/2021-best-books-recommended-by-the-goto-book-club

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Rolf Dobelli • The Art of Thinking Clearly • https://amzn.to/3qavZzI
Adam Grant • Think Again • https://amzn.to/3H82Wnb
Ted Nelson • Computer Lib/Dream Machines • https://amzn.to/3mmLDXs
Aileen Nielsen • Practical Fairness • https://amzn.to/3mmblLL
Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais • Team Topologies • https://amzn.to/3JcfhIQ
Yuval Harari • Sapiens • https://amzn.to/3J8CNqm
Gojko Adzic & David Evans • 50 Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories • https://amzn.to/32hb6e2
Eric Evans • Domain-Driven Design • https://amzn.to/3qb7HWn
Nir Eyal • Indistractable • https://amzn.to/3J485OO
Jake Knapp & John Zeratsky • Make Time • https://amzn.to/3mjdsjs
Liz Rice • Container Security • https://amzn.to/3e7Hkuy
Duncan McGregor & Nat Pryce • Java to Kotlin • https://amzn.to/32ajzQc
Laurentiu Spilca • Spring Start Here • https://amzn.to/3pbOBQw
Adam Tornhill • Your Code as a Crime Scene • https://amzn.to/3J8GNXU
David Thomas & Andrew Hunt • The Pragmatic Programmer • https://amzn.to/3sm8eHG
Adam Rutherford & Hannah Fry • The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged) • https://amzn.to/3yIM6br
Rutger Bergman • Humankind • https://amzn.to/3EoD4BR
Emily St. John Mandel • Station Eleven • https://amzn.to/3suVz5o

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Eoin Woods Recommends: Container Security, Java to Kotlin&  Spring Start Here

Eoin Woods: Hello, I'm Eoin Woods, the author of “Continuous Architecture: Sustainable Architecture in an Agile and Cloud-Centric World”. It's been a pleasure to be part of the GOTO Book Club this year. And as Christmas is approaching, we thought it'd be fun to nominate books that either we'd like to receive as presents or we'd like to give as presents. I've got three. My first one, rather unsurprisingly, is Liz Rice's excellent book on container security. I interviewed Liz as part of the GOTO Book Club series. It's a terrific book. It's terrific because, firstly, it explains containers from the absolute fundamentals. It gets you to build one from the command line. And secondly, it tells you all you're going to need to know about the very important topic of container security.

To facilitate scalability and resilience, many organizations now run applications in cloud native environments using containers and orchestration. But how do you know if the deployment is secure? This practical book examines key underlying technologies to help developers, operators and security professionals assess security risks and determine appropriate solutions.

Container Security
My second book is Duncan McGregor and Nat Pryce's book, "Java to Kotlin." I love the Kotlin language, I've been using it now for a couple of years. When people move to Kotlin, though, it's sometimes deceptively close to Java, and they don't really make use of its full power. And Nat and Duncan have done a great job of explaining what the important parts of Kotlin are and how to really make the move into the core of the language as opposed to just updating your Java syntax.

And talking of Java. My third book is from my colleague, Laurentiu Spilca. It's "Spring Start Here." Lots and lots of people have been using Spring for years, but it's really easy to just use complex frameworks like Spring by copying other people's examples and getting by. Laurentiu's book's fantastic because it explains all of the fundamentals you need to really understand the framework and make the most use of it, and of course, studying Laurentiu's very direct, clear, and engaging style. So those are the three books that I'd like to receive for Christmas. I hope you get what you want as well.

Fabio Pereira Recommends: Make Time and Indistractable

Fabio Pereira: Hi, everyone from the GOTO Book Club community. I'm Fabio Pereira, author of the book "Digital Nudge," and MasterClass, "The Psychology of UX," and it's an honor for me to be part of this community.

I've been asked by the organizers of the community, now that the holiday season is just around the corner, if I were to give someone a book, an inspirational book, or recommend a book at the end of the year, which book would it be? And then I actually chose two books. They are very related. And they have something around them, which is around focused.

One of the books that I want to recommend...and to be really honest, I really like to hear books, to listen to audiobooks. So I have the app Audible on my phone. And I want to show you the first one, which is called "Make Time." "Make Time" is a book from Jake Knapp and John Zaretsky. Jake Knapp is the author of the book "Design Sprint," which is also an amazing book. And "Make Time" is a book about how to focus on what matters every day in your life. We live in a world with an overload of information, we have access to everything that we want on the internet, and then focus and create the opportunities during the time that we have on the day because everyone only has 24 hours to focus on what really matters is really important.

In Indistractable, Eyal reveals the hidden psychology driving us to distraction. He describes why solving the problem is not as simple as swearing off our devices: Abstinence is impractical and often makes us want more.

Indistractable
The second book I want to show you is also from my Audible app, which is called "Indistractable." "Indistractable" is an amazing book by Nir Eyal. Nir is the author of the book "Hooked," which is a best-selling book as well. And he released "indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life." I would really recommend these two books, "Make Time" and "Indistractable." Have an amazing end of the year. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year to everyone. And I hope to see you all in 2022 as part of the GOTO community.

Dave Farley Recommends: User Stories and Domain-Driven Design

Dave Farley: Hi, my name's Dave Farley. I'd like to recommend two books as gifts for people. One of them is "Fifty Quick Ideas To Improve Your User Stories" by Gojko Adzic and David Evans. It's a fantastic book that's got lots of tips and ideas that will just jog your memory about things when you get stuck when you're trying to divide stories up into smaller chunks or come up with more effective stories. I carry it around on my iPad to remind me when I get stuck. It's a fantastic book.

"What Eric has managed to capture is a part of the design process that experienced object designers have always used, but that we have been singularly unsuccessful as a group in conveying to the rest of the industry. We've given away bits and pieces of this knowledge...but we've never organized and systematized the principles of building domain logic. This book is important."--Kyle Brown, author of Enterprise Java(TM) Programming with IBM(R) WebSphere(R)

Domain-Driven Design
The other book that I'd recommend has been important to me for a long time now, which is "Domain-Driven Design" by Eric Evans. It's quite a difficult book, but I think it's profound and important in the way it talks about design. I must confess, when I first read it, I thought, "Isn't this just what object orientation's supposed to be?" But that's kind of the point, it was getting to some really important things. And it gave us a language to describe and address design, at both the fine-grain level and the massive level of big systems. And I think that there are some genuinely important ideas in that book. So those are my two recommendations. Happy Christmas.

Kevlin Henney Recommends: Your Code as a Crime Scene,  The Pragmatic Programmer, The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged): Adventures in Math and Science

Kevlin Henney: Okay, season's greetings. My name's Kevlin Henney. I have been asked what books I would give or love to receive, and given I've got them, I have enjoyed receiving them, for this holiday season, if you're stuck for gift ideas, or even looking at what to do in the new year. Now, I tried to keep the list short, and I was unable to. So I've got five books that touch on software development, but also broader inspiration, and also, you know, what to do in your spare time. So I'm going to start off, let's just dive into the code, "Your Code as a Crime Scene" by Adam Tornhill. This book was published in 2015. It's a book of code analytics. What I love about this is that it really brings to life the idea that the misnomer we currently use for version control systems, people call them repos, repository. It sounds like a dumping ground, and sometimes that's how it feels. They are version control systems, which means they have a history, and they are associated with people. There is sociology here that we can understand about how our code evolves over time and with respect to people, rather than treating it as some static artifact with no history. The whole point about history is that we understand the past so we are able to act on it meaningfully in the future. So there's a lot of good ideas in here.

The Pragmatic Programmer
Okay, the next one, sticking with that kind of theme, "The Pragmatic Programmer," who were in fact, the publishers of this book, published the 20th-anniversary edition of "The Pragmatic Programmer." This was actually published the end of 1999, but its copyright date was 2000. The 2nd edition, 2020. A lot of really good stuff in here. The original book was very much a touchstone for the software craft community. It played an integral part in conversations about the technical side of Agile development and gave us a number of ideas that we still use today that have been popularized, things like the DRY principle, don't repeat yourself, which is widely misunderstood to just be magical code. Here, they redress that. They update the examples. We have 20 years more experience with this. This is not at the beginning of this kind of era, we are now in the midst of it. It's moved to the next generation of advice as well as clarifying what people are actually talking about in terms of the first edition. So yeah, this is well worth your time as a software developer.

Written as a series of self-contained sections and filled with classic and fresh anecdotes, thoughtful examples, and interesting analogies, The Pragmatic Programmer illustrates the best approaches and major pitfalls of many different aspects of software development.

The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged)
Now, you're probably a little bit nerdy, especially if you're watching this. On the GOTO Book Club, there was a live event relatively recently that I hosted with Hannah Fry and Simon Singh, and you can find sort of interviews and sessions on the GOTO Book Club Live site. And Hanna Fry with her co-conspirator, Adam Rutherford... I say co-conspirator because they do a BBC Radio 4 series, "The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry," and they kind of distilled a lot of these kinds of thoughts into "Complete Guide To Absolutely Everything Abridged." I was fortunate enough also to see them do, kind of, the live show relatively recently. A lot of good stuff in here debunks a number of commonly misheld views but also asks questions that you never even thought to ask, and answers them highly approachable, highly digestible. This is a great read.

Humankind: A Hopeful History
Kind of sticking with a couple of themes here. In terms of debunking, probably the most significant book I have read this year is "Humankind: A Hopeful History" by Rutger Bregman. And I say most significant because it really...I found this a moving and positive book. What he does in this book is he takes a historical and sociological view to debunk and undermine the kind of narrative we give ourselves that humans are not...well, we're not nice. The world can be, you know, a bad place and all the rest of it. And if we turn on the news, then this seems to often be the case. But he actually points out that our strength is actually kindness by default. Human beings are actually much nicer than we make out to be. But news cycles, news outlets, our desire for novelty, and the fact that this is structured to reward us with that which is novel, and exciting, and unusual, unfortunately, leads us in the wrong direction away from understanding our better nature. And he goes through and kind of explores, quite thoroughly and quite positively, actually who we are. So yeah, this is...I found this uplifting and thought-provoking, and definitely worth your time.

Station Eleven
And I'm gonna close with something, kind of, a sort of a counterbalance, a work of fiction by Emily St. John Mandel, "Station Eleven." Absolutely wonderful book. This was published in 2014. It's been made into a TV series. I haven't seen that, I can't comment on the adaptation of the quality of that. But this book is about a global pandemic, although, a little more severe than the one we are currently experiencing. I actually read this whilst traveling just as the pandemic was beginning to break. I was traveling last February and realized my choice of the book while I was traveling could have been better. But Emily St. John Mandel's writing style is just wonderful. I would quite happily read a shopping list if she wrote one out and published it. But this is, kind of, a better post-apocalypse story. And her narrative style is well worth your time. So Season's Greetings, I hope that's been of some use and some inspiration, and have a happy New Year.

Phil Winder Recommends: Practical Fairness

Phil Winder: Hi, there. It's Phil Winder here, CEO of window.ai and author of O'Reilly's "Reinforcement Learning." The book I'd like to recommend for this Christmas is a book called "Practical Fairness" by Aileen Nielsen. And I thought this was quite a diversion from O'Reilly's typical books. So Aileen, this lady, comes from a background, a legal background, not a technical one. And in this book, she's talking about how we can make machine learning fairer, and make the processes involved more secure and safer.

Many realistic best practices are emerging at all steps along the data pipeline today, from data selection and preprocessing to closed model audits. Author Aileen Nielsen guides you through technical, legal, and ethical aspects of making code fair and secure, while highlighting up-to-date academic research and ongoing legal developments related to fairness and algorithms.

I really liked this book, not necessarily for the technical content, even though there is some technical content in there. There is code that you can, you know, you can use and tinker with and use in your projects. But really, I think that this is just one of the first of many interesting books on the place that AI and ML should take in modern society. I know that companies are under increasing scrutiny to make their models fair, and to make sure that their users are protected. So if you're interested in that subject, and you have a slightly technical leaning, I definitely recommend this book. A really enjoyable read from someone in a background that, you know, we're kind of not used to. So it's really nice to be seeing authors that are coming from different disciplines. So that's my recommendation. Also, I probably should recommend my book, "Reinforcement Learning," also by O'Reilly. So check that out as well. But anyway, thanks a lot. Cheers, bye.

Preben Thoro Recommends: The Art of Thinking Clearly

Preben Thoro: "The Art of Thinking Clearly" by Rolf Dobelli. Here we go. This is a brilliant book about all this stupidity, all these silly patterns we apply to the world around us, to everything we experience, just to make it fit into our picture of the world. And what I really like about this book is it helps me understand how I behave, many of the things I do and don't do, my reaction patterns, and it helps me understand a lot of the world around me. And especially, if we combine it with this book, "Think Again" by Adam Grant. It really helps me understand myself and other people around me. These two would be the perfect Christmas gift this year.

The Art of Thinking Clearly by world-class thinker and entrepreneur Rolf Dobelli is an eye-opening look at human psychology and reasoning — essential reading for anyone who wants to avoid “cognitive errors” and make better choices in all aspects of their lives.

Sven Johann Recommends: Team Topologies and Sapiens

Sven Johann: Hi, there. I want to recommend two books for the Christmas season. "Team Topologies" and "Sapiens." "Team Topology" is written by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. So what is the book about? Software architecture and software delivery cannot be successful without a good organizational architecture. And "Team Topology" really improves our understanding of organizational architecture and helps us form teams, and enabling those teams to be more effective or helping them to meet their challenges. Really cool book. It should have been written 15 years ago. So, for everyone who is dealing with cross-functional teams, the book is a must.

Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity.

Sapiens
Another must, in my opinion, is "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari. Harari, tells the history of our species in a very funny manner. So there is lots of dense information, how Sapiens became the only animal that can believe in things that do not actually exist, and which was really interesting, and how that skill made us the dominating species. Really interesting and entertaining book.

Mike Amundsen Recommends: Computer Lib//Dream Machines

Mike Amundsen: Hey, Mike Amundsen here, author of "Design and Build Great Web APIs," and a new upcoming book, "RESTful Web Microservices Cookbook." But the book I want to talk to you about today, the one I recommend you buy all your friends for the holiday season is this one here, "Computer Lib" by Ted Nelson. It goes by another name, "Dream Machines" by Ted Nelson. In fact, it's two books in one back-to-back. It was originally self-published in the '70s by Ted Nelson, the person who invented words like hypertext and hyperlink, and so many other really cool aspects of what we know of as the web today.