STG's

I've read Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master last week. It was pretty good, although if you have a few years of experience and good practices, you should be familiar with most of what it says, even if you don't follow it in practice :-) . Some of their bullet points are: - Don't duplicate - Write flexible code - Use Contracts, assertions and exceptions - Test - Automate where possible - Use a version control system. Obviously, many of these points have a lot to do with refactoring and XP. They also have another neat book on Automation, Pragmatic Project Automation: How to Build, Deploy, and Monitor Java Apps . Obviously that is much less relevant to a Delphi programmer, but you can still learn quite a bit from it. After I started reading it, I automated large sections of my build and release process (in PHP - it's easy to use in the command-line, too, and some parts are re-usable on the site). It saves a lot of time and enables you to stop worrying if you ...

I recently read Working Effectively with Legacy Code . It was an excellent book. It focus on legacy code, defined as code that doesn't use unit testing - yes, it is a narrow definition :-) . It has an excellent range of techniques for refactoring and getting older code under test, as well as adding features without breaking anything. If you have an older program that you are moving under a testing framework, the insights on the book are well worth the price. In particular, the various ways to get objects decoupled so that you can get them tested without creating a lot of support code are very useful.

In his image (Book One of the Christ Clone Trilogy) *Very* good. The basic premise is based on cells being found still alive in the Shroud of Turin. These cells are used to create to a clone. The pace of the book is excelent, although the nuking might have been a bit excessive :-). Lots of questions unanswered on the end. I've already gotten the second one. Crown of Slaves Yet another Honor Harrington book. Honor shows just a bit on this one, just like on Shadow of Saganami. It was pretty good - Victor Cachat (which appeared on several of the short-story Anthologies) makes a great showing as usual, and the trend of making books on the HonorVerse without the focus on Honor seems to be working well.

Nick Bradbury: Depressing piracy statistic On his blog, Nick Bradbury, of HomeSite, TopStyle and FeedDemon fame, (I use TopStyle and FeedDemon myself) mentioned that the previous week's Feeddemon activations were 90% cracked serials. Ouch. I'm still struggling with the question of adding activation to my own products. Obviously, the big question is if it would add more sales than would be lost by those who hate activation. In Nick's case activation is almost invisible since it has to access the net anyway. My utilities don't so it's bound to be much more annoying...