Professional XNA Programming: Building Games for Xbox 360 and Windows with XNA Game Studio 2.0 - page 112

General Development and Programming

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  Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code - Someone told me when I read this book on the flight to the PDC two years ago that you could probably dry up a cellar with this book. Maybe he is right; this book is all about crazy design pattern and rules. The first couple of chapters are good to read and the rest is more of a reference. Anyway, the idea counts and refactoring is one of the most useful processes today in writing big programs. This very useful book was first released in 1999 and still applies 100%.

• Rapid Development - This is a good book about software design and keeping schedules, but it is a bit too long and sometimes hard to read (you know I have this problem of reading only half the book and then never finding time to finish it). It was written back in 1996 and the techniques described still apply, but some of the ideas are not as flexible as they could be with all this new technology around (for example, when using Agile Methodologies you have to plan differently). Still it is a very good book and it contains a couple of interesting stories from big products like MS Word and how they never kept their schedule.

• Code Complete 2 - One of the best books ever for any kind of programmer. It is about describing the process of developing software and helps you to find out the most efficient ways to manage your projects. It goes into great detail by explaining which data structures, which routines, which loops , or which strategies are the most useful. It is one of the books I would recommend to both new and experienced programmers. This book just helps anyone and should be on every programmer’s desk, not just in their book shelves .

• Managing Agile Projects - What does Agile Projects mean? It is about scaling and customizing your project depending on the customer feedback. That still sounds too vague? Ok, it means that you don’t plan every single bit before writing code, but you cut your project into smaller pieces and only plan the overview and then directly start developing. Now you can present a very early version really fast and with the help of feedback (customers or yourself) you can adjust your project instead of wasting time and resources developing something no one wants. You can also shorten specific parts of your project if you see there is no time left or other parts are more important, which again is not possible if you had planned every bit of your project in advance. It is a technique that goes hand-in-hand with unit testing and refactoring (see the Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code book above). This book gives a very broad overview and doesn’t really talk about coding, it’s just methodologies.

• Maximizing .NET Performance - I’m a performance freak. In the past I often tried to re-implement existing and working code into assembler code just to see how much faster it could get. Later I found out that it is often much more important to work at a much higher level and rethink a problem until the solution is good enough to run very fast even if not optimized to every bit. This is still true and I still think that most performance problems come from bad coding or suboptimal algorithms and not because of the language. However, to even think of good solutions you need some knowledge of what is possible, what is fast, and how certain things affect your performance. This book gives you a very useful inside view of .NET and covers a lot of tricks and tips about .NET performance. It is also a good reference book.

• Code Generation in Microsoft .NET - I first heard of this topic from the DotNetRocks radio show where the author Kathleen Dollard was the guest a few years ago. She talked about code generation using templates and other tricks. I immediately bought this book. It is mostly written in Visual Basic, but a C# conversion exists too. It does a good job explaining how to use code generation with the Code Dom, but does not go into detail about MSIL (which I was more interested in). Anyway, the book is written nicely and I learned a lot from it. The book presents an entire framework for building SQL bindings, stored procedures, and building Win Forms from XML templates. It is also one of the first books on this subject (and maybe still the only one going into the Code Dom instead of MSIL).