The first of which is “The Art of Unit Testing (with examples in ‘C#’ .NET)” by Roy Osherove, the only book on this list I have finished reading. This book I found to be essential reading, and I don’t say that often. I rate this book so highly I recommended that it become a required text for the “Agile and Component based Development” Module at my old university.  If you are looking to improve your unit testing, or if you are just starting out with unit testing this book is for you.  The author purposefully avoids the topic Test Driven Development (TDD) in order to achieve clarity and focus on the actually unit testing of code without the confusion which can be caused by trying to do so whilst at the same time explaining the TDD workflow.

C# is the love of my life.. two more books on the language from two highly regarded individuals is exactly what the doctor ordered.

(The MEAP for the second edition (C# 4) is available here)

2010 for me is going to be the year of C# 4, Objective C, Cocoa and Ruby.

When I was a Microsoft Student Partner I got it in the neck from my friends (especially the Linux Zealot housemate) about my favourite language and framework not being portable nor open source.  This really pushed by button (as they well knew) considering I am passionate Open Source, Cross Platform development and learning new languages D= !

I am a massive fan of the Mono Project.  I love the idea of C# being truly cross platform.  I also like the fact that many of the .NET libraries are being ported to run on Linux and OSX.  Over the last year I have been working hard to get all my apps that I write in C# to work as well on Linux (where possible).  But there was one platform I did not work with.. the ever more popular OSX.

I find that Apple have an interesting platform (although I may not agree on principle with their ethos).  But this doesn’t mean that I don’t wish to expand my skill set to be a competent developer on their platform.

I purchased a Macbook this Christmas, against my better judgement, and have purchased these two books:

Why learn Objective C when I could just use C# with Mono?

Because I, as a hacker at heart, am not satisfied with some abstraction over what is going on… I want to be a strong Objective C developer with a sound knowledge of Cocoa and how things work in the Apple world.  I find the difference from Java and .NET refreshing and I love learning stuff that is completely new.  I want to be able to more effectively use and contribute back into open source projects like CocoaSharp and MacRuby / HotCocoa.

I like how its low level and not “as easy”… I have recently graduated and I am still hungry so lets hope this new educational expedition lives up to my expectations.