Agile SCM 2005 - Reflecting back on the year in books

• Clearcase Deployment

• Practical Perforce by Laura Wingerd

• Pragmatic Version Control w/Subversion , by Mike Mason
• Subversion Version Control , by Bill Nagel

Although the majority of these appear at first glance to be tool/vendor-specific, most of them in fact have extremely useful general insights and nuggets about Software CM and/or Version Control, particularly the titles from Laura Wingerd , Brian White , and Vincent Maraia (though I have several quibbles with numerous statements in "The Build Master").

Agile Management and IT Career Development

There have been a number of books in the last year or two that seem less about CM or agile development and more about CM toolsmithing and administration, or agile management. While they might not be what you would expect to see on a list of "Agile CM" readings, I think they are nevertheless worth your attention!

Agile Estimating and Planning and Managing Agile Projects

Mike Cohn's brand new book Agile Estimating and Planning looks pretty incredible. Whether or not your project is Agile, this seems to be the nuts and bolts of real-world estimating and planning. This is not what formal project management textbooks say to do - it is what you end up having to do anyway in the real-world, at least if you want to succeed.

In the same vein, Sanjiv Augustine's Managing Agile Projects gets at the heart of the social and political dynamics of real-world project management, and managing interactions and relationships with your stakeholders and project team-members (rather than burying your head in the GUI of the project management tool).

Behind Closed Doors and Ship It!

Esther Derby and Johanna Rothman have collaborated together on an indispensable "tour de force" in Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management , from The Pragmatic bookshelf . Every budding and first-time software manager should grab this and read it.

Also from The Pragmatic bookshelf is Jared Richardson and Will Gwaltney's Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects , which is exactly what the title suggests it is.

Both these books are just published in 2005 and both look to be winners by giving insider knowledge of what happens in the real-world and what's necessary, successful, and ethical, in order to deal with it.

Scripting, Automation, and Staying Employed

Just about anyone involved in Software CM has had to do some scripting here and there, and Perl is the language predominantly used to script and automate many such tasks. No Perl-scripting SCM automaton should be without Peter Scott's 2004 book Perl Medic: Transforming Legacy Code .

For those first starting out as toolsmiths and automators, Mike Clark 's 2004 Jolt award winning Pragmatic Project Automation is another must-have.

And for those who are primarily doing IT and scripting and only dabbling into the SCM process area out of necessity (because no one else is there to do it), keep learning about SCM! But while' you're at it I would strongly recommend picking up Chad Fowler 's 2005 title My Job Went to India and all I got was this lousy book . This book seems kind of important as a wake-up call for not only keeping skills current, but keeping one's career "marketable" and making oneself indispensable.

Would-be and Lesser Known Classics

Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns and Practices by Robert C. Martin

This book won a much deserved 2002 Jolt Award. For me, few other books successfully combine and convey the essence of software design, design patterns, refactoring and agility in a single tome. "Uncle Bob" successfully inter-relates principles of object-oriented design to design patterns and refactoring and agile methods in