Yuriy's blog

A huge and exhaustive book Hadoop: The Definitive Guide by Tom White is basically everything you need to understand the Hadoop and the "Zoo" of frameworks and libraries build on top of it. Lots of examples and detailed explanations including also chapters on how to set it up and administer. Indeed a guide to start to use your big data.

Ethics of Big Data by Kord Davis is quite philosophical book about the ethical issues of collection and exploitation of the BigData. I would say it's more oriented to the CTOs and general management audience then to the developers. It contains an interesting analysis of the Fortune 50 privacy policies and also suggests a comprehensive framework for facilitating ethical discussions in the business environment.

Privacy and Big Data by Terence Craig and Mary E. Ludloff is a great book that addresses the today's issues on privacy in the world of the "big data". The authors are discussing two major points of view on the privacy: the U.S. view of privacy as a commodity, and EU's view of privacy as an essential human right. Terence Craig and Mary E. Ludloff are trying to explain that your digital footprint is not only about your online activity and advertisement, but it also about the video surveillance, laws that are allowing government agencies to intrude into your private life in the name of security and many more. I recommend this book to whom is concerned about their privacy, it won't say you what to do but at least it will increase the level of your awareness.

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering  by  Frederick P. Brooks Jr . was the book that opened my eyes on software engineering planning when I was asked to manage the team of developers back in the 2007. It's a really deep dive into imperfectness of the man-month approach of planning in the software development that is actually leads us to the idea of an agile development process.

Interesting small book by 37signals about "The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful application". I'm a big fan of such agile principles like DSTCPW and YAGNI and this book underlines different practices of how to achieve it in the development of web applications. Few years ago with my colleague we did a presentation on these practices and on how we used them in our project. You can find the free pdf version here .

One more book I read long time ago. Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg is a very good book about Scrum. It is based on the real life examples. I glanced on my bookshelf recently and browsed through this book to recall things. It was a good thing to discover that in our company we are using a lot of technics described in it. I think this book is the must read for any agile software development team. For my Russian-speaking friends there is a free pdf version in Russian translated by Ukrainian Agile Community .

MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft® .NET Framework Application Development Foundation, Second edition by Tony Northrup is a very good book to understand the essentials of the .NET Framework. I used it to pass the the exam few years ago. I would say it does not cover all the exam questions, more work and experience is required to pass it, but as a .NET book it works very well.

Just Spring by Madhusudhan Konda is a nice 80 pages book. Basically a brief introduction to the Spring Framework. The all you have to know to just start using Spring.