Recommendation: The Clean Coder

[Cihan]

An excellent book about what makes a _professional_ software developer.

This book is a great guide for someone who strives to be a true professional who can create useful, reliable, and maintainable software even in the hard pressures of work. (whether the pressures be caused by deadlines, clients, colleagues, management etc.)

It includes a bunch of more technical stuff about the coding process and tools for it (TDD, testing, writing maintainable code etc.), but what I found most intriguing and helpful were the chapters about soft skills in software development, e.g.:
* time management
* communication with clients
* estimation of required work (and how to communicate it to clients)
* how to approach new technologies
* handling pressure
* how to efficiently create software with other people without running into conflicts.

So if you are already familiar with the more technical aspects of creating good software and you already know how you learn new technical skills best, feel free to skip chapters 5-8.

The book has a lot of example scenarios of complicated situations you might run into in your work. Some of those examples are written as (made-up) dialogues between people, which some might find especially useful but others a bit annoying.

[Perttu]

Thanks for the recommendation. Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship from same author was a very useful book, and this appears to be a good one, too.

I'll order it to Helsinki library, since at the moment only London and Tampere have a copy.