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The 5 technical books that shaped my mind

In my IT career I have read a lot of technical books, most part of them really useful, just few useless. The following five are the most important because they pointed me to the right direction in my professional career and shaped my mind more than others.

Thinking in Java (2nd edition) by Bruce Eckel, Prentice-Hall. Read in 2000.
This book was the best approach for a former C developer like me to understand the object oriented principles while learning a real (and amazing and powerful) OO programming language.

Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB by Rod Johnson, Wrox. Read in 2006.
During the 2/3 years before reading this book I was deeply sure that the world of Java was too beautiful to end with EJBs. This book gave me the final confirmation about that and helped me to quickly understand the benefits of the Spring framework. Wouldn't it have been otherwise from the Spring creator.

Jenkins - The definite guide by John Ferguson Smart, Creative Commons Edition. Read in 2011.
The only available guide about Jenkins. The perfect book to understand Continuous Integration and become a Jenkins expert. This book covers everything about Jenkins but plugins development.

Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and David Farley, Addison-Wesley. Read in 2011.
The bible of Continuous Delivery. This book covers every possible aspect of CD. It doesn't provide definitive solutions, but it sets up readers mind to think in terms or real CD.

Agile Data Science by Russell Jurney, O'Reilly. Read in 2014.
It helped me to understand what Big Data (too often this is only an abused buzz word) really means and how to set strategies to handle them. The reference language in this book is Python, but the principles explained could be applied in different language contexts as well.

Many years ago when I started my career in the modern IT it was really hard to find good books covering specific aspects of a given technology/methodology. And the shared resources in the web were just 1/1000 of what you could find online today. So definitively I encourage people to be curious and take advantage of the great choice of books and learning material currently available.


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