Another book completed

I finished reading Code Complete 2 today, another book in my quest to bring my technical skills into the 21st century. Definitely a worthwhile book to read, especially for the beginning programmer, though it is already 4 years old. I worked a long time in C and C++ and I've seen many of the debates which the author discusses actually happen.

That said, I found myself wanting something different at this point in my reading life. I want to read more about projects in industry which have failed, and ones that have succeeded. I want to read about the post mortems which are done on those projects. At my previous job, the developers always wanted to do post mortems, but they never happened, for one reason or another. I think the view was that management thought they would turn into massive bitch sessions, whereas developers didn't expect things to actually ever change, so they never pushed the issue very hard. I am going to reread The Mythical Man Month sometime in the near future. I first read it back in 1994, just out of college and into the workplace. It will be interesting to see how I relate to it now.

The other thing I wanted was a book that got into the design issues specifically surrounding C#. I've still got more searching to do to find that book. I'm not sure if I'm looking for a design patterns book, a Nutshell book, a recipes book, or something else entirely, but I know I still have a lot to learn about application development in the .NET world.

I am starting my reread of ASP.NET 3.5 with C# 2008, and I figure that will take me till the end of the month. Sure I only finished it a month and a half ago, but I'm knee deep in a major ASP.NET project, and it's the perfect time to reinforce the skills I learned earlier.

I plan to get back to writing more frequently here again. It's not that I'm not working hard, it's that I kind of got into the flow of my new job, and for a brief period, thought I knew what I was doing. Now that I'm back into ASP.NET, there are all new mistakes to make and lessons to learn, so expect more posts, soon.