Mac and iPhone programmers will want to read this. It also applies to the open source GNUstep project, used on Linux and Windows. You need to know Objective C. 400 pages.

Java programmers will find this valuable. 300 pages, contents:

1. – Dependency injection: what’s all the hype?
2. – Time for injection
3. – Investigating DI
4. – Building modular applications
5. – Scope: a fresh breath of state
6. – More use cases in scoping
7. – From birth to death: object lifecycle
8. – Managing an object’s behavior
9. – Best practices in code design
10. – Integrating with third-party frameworks
11. – Dependency injection in action!

appendix A – The Butterfly Container
appendix B – Smarty Pants for Adobe Flex

Developers will want to read this book. With a foreword by Erich Gamma, of Eclipse fame. Hardcover, 700 pages.

If you are planning a career in Agile Software Development, then this book contains good advice. The foreword is by Ward Cunningham. See also the author’s site. This is an Open Book at O’Reilly. 125 pages.

Here is a textbook on software development. If you can get past the use of the word ‘emergent’, this is a good book. 350 pages, hardcover.

A collection of essays by leading software designers. Sections include systems architecture, enterprise application architecture, and user application architecture.

• What is architecture / by John Klein and David Weiss
• A tale of two systems: a modern-day software fable / by Pete Goodliffe
• Architecting for scale / by Jim Waldo
• Making memories / by Michael Nygard
• Resource-oriented architectures: being “in the web” / by Brian Sletten
• Data grows up: the architecture of the Facebook platform / by Dave Fetterman
• Xen and the beauty of virtualization / by Derek Murray and Keir Fraser
• Guardian: a fault-tolerant operating system environment / by Greg Lehey
• JPC: an X86 PC emulator in pure Java / by Rhys Newman and Christopher Dennis
• The strength of metacircular virtual machines: JIKES RVM / by Ian Rogers and Dave Grove
• GNU EMACS: creeping featurism is a strength / by Jim Blandy
• When the bazaar sets out to build cathedrals / by Till Adam and Mirko Boehm
• Software architecture: object-oriented versus functional / by Bertrand Meyer
• Reading the classics / by Panagiotis Louridas.

350 pages.

When you design a web app, you will find this book valuable. 400 pages.

“The authors have done a fantastic job of distilling reams of arcane literature into an indispensable guide that strikes the perfect balance between theory and implementation.” — Matthew Russell

A tutorial with visual gags that will keep anyone, teen or older, glued to the pages. It still retains the great O’Reilly quality. 600 pages.

This book is about design patterns, and the examples are in Java but the concepts apply to many languages. The book is based on the premise that good code matters. In 150 pages, it packs in topics that are vital to a programmer.