Tag Archives: books

Book Recommendation: Professional Team Foundation Server 2010

The latest addition to my technical book collection is Professional Team Foundation Server 2010. This is a “must have” book for anybody who is a TFS admin or even a Team Project admin.

I’m about two-thirds of the way through the book and I honestly can’t go more than one or two pages without finding some new tip or piece of information to try out in my own environment. The great strength of the book comes from the wealth of experience the authors drawn upon when discussing each of the topics.

The book itself takes a comprehensive look at the many aspects of Team Foundation Server, including version control, work item tracking, reporting, process templates, build, and administration. The administration content is extremely useful and the topic is given a full third of the book. For anybody who works in an enterprise environment or who has to deal with high availability and disaster recovery systems, you’ll be glad to see chapters devoted specifically to addressing these topics.

Lastly, for anybody interesting in pursuing the Microsoft certification for Team Foundation Server 2010 (exam 70-512), this has been touted as the unofficial training book.

Reading about HTML5

I just picked up the Lawson/Sharp book Introducing HTML5 (Voices that Matter) and, so far, I like what I’ve read.  The book is authored by a couple of developers (Lawson and Sharp) who can relate to the struggles that the rest of us have with regards to learning a new technology, and they write about the topic with pragmatism in mind.  They also lace the content with a wit that keeps you engaged and entertained in the material – a struggle sometimes when it comes to writing about language topics.

Introducing HTML5 It’s not often you’ll find “WTF” references in a technical book.

This is the second New Riders Voices That Matter book that I’ve purchased and have been pleased with (the other being Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards).  Whether its due to the author or the publisher, these books tend to do a good job presenting technical material in a fun way that makes you actually want to keep reading.

Hard to consider the idea of a page-turning technical book…

So if you’re interested in finding out about this new technology that is HTML5, I’d definitely recommend the Lawson/Sharp book.  Pick up a copy today.