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Resources

Our Technical Resources page contains links to recommended sites and books of current technology trends.

Recommended titles
The following is a short list of recommended books for managers and developers. I've included direct links to Amazon if you are interested in purchasing any of these.
Software Development Process
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Fred Brooks is one of the early classics on software engineering, discussing those qualities that determine project success or failure. This is the source of the somewhat famous Brooks' law that states the "adding resources to a late project will make it later." Brooks goes on to discuss the human dynamics in projects and the classic mistakes that project managers make. If you are, or plan to be, a project manager or team lead, you have to read this book.
Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams by Tom Demarco and Tim Lister, a good followup after reading Brooks, looks at human and environmental factors and their impact on projects. They point out that creation of software is a human-intensive activity, and that it only makes sense to create an environment where your people can be most productive.
Agile Software Development by Alistair Cockburn is one of those books that comes along in a decade that has far reaching impacts on software engineering. Agile software development is a good "cookbook" for creating methodologies. As any methodologist knows, there is no "one size fits all projects" methodologies. Cockburn examines the attributes of a project (team size, team location, deadline, architecture, organizational politics) and how they factor into customizing your methodology.
Managing the Software Process by Watts Humphreys is the seminal text on the Capability Maturity Model, a formal measure of a software organizations ability to delivery quality software on schedule and within budget. A must read for anyone whose organization is using (or contemplating) this model, it is also recommended for managers and others interested in process to understand those qualities that separate the chaotic development process from a well-tuned, repeatable development organization.
Software Design
Design Patterns by the "Gang of Four" (GOF) is another book that should be on every developer's shelf. In writing software, we continually come up with similar solutions when we coma across the same types of problems. The GOF have formalized these as design patterns that are useful for solving various types of problems. Design patterns have become even more prevalent since this book was written (1994), and are increasingly a part of the developer's language. There are other patterns books out there, but this one you definitely got to have.
Designing Enterprise Applications with the Java 2 Platform (Enterprise Edition) is a good book by Sun J2EE architects that provides a set blueprints for architecting a J2EE system. If you do J2EE, read this.
Java Development
Java Tools for Extreme Programming:... is a tutorial reference to the more popular XP programming tools: Ant, Junit, Cactus, JMeter, and others. There are several books on all these tools, but this on book covers most of the basics for those tools.
High-Performance Java Platform Computing goes beyond simple thread programming to developing more formalized constructs to safely and efficiently manage a multi-threaded environment. The book has a liberal sampling of code (downloadable from the authors' site http://jhpc.org/). This book (and code) saved me many times over on one project.
XML and Java: Developing Web.... A good introduction to XML programming with Java. I also recommend McLaughlin's book (Java and XML), but read this one first if you haven't worked with XML and Java. Many examples of where XML with Java is useful, plus useful classes.
Java and XML (O'Reilly Java Tools) by Brett McLaughlin and Mike Loukides is the O'Reilly book on Java/XML programming. A good reference.
Java and XSLT (O'Reilly Java) covers XSL transforms, the preferred methods for converting XML to other data formats, such as HTML, or to another XML document format. XSLT is very powerful, but also complex. This book should help you get started.
Java Servlet Programming, by Jason Hunter and William Crawford, is one of the better (if not best) books on programming servlets. Jason is a recognized authority on servlets, having a hand in their development (visit his page at http://servlets.com/).
Java Web Services is a good overview of web services and the Java APIs for writing and calling them.