Books I've read in 2010

I mostly read online articles/blog posts to keep me up to date. I read books whenever I get a chance. Below are some of the books which I've read this year.

1. First, I finished reading the books I was in the middle of reading in 2009 - wiki page of this book. I highly recommend this book to any programmer, more so to anyone who manages a project, be it a Development Manager or Project Manager.
2. Agile Software Development with Scrum - This is a basic book on what Scrum is and explains the concepts very clearly. One of the authors of this book is Ken Schwaber, who is one of the co-founders of Scrum. I have been using Scrum more more than 3 years now and have been ScrumMaster for most of this time. I have read parts of this book few years back and so wanted to read it again and it made some of the things more clear to me. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Scrum. If you are thinking about starting to use Scrum, but not clear about it or it's benefits, then this is the book you need to read.
3. Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great - This book is the bible for Agile Retrospectives and is written by Esther Derby, who is well known for her thoughts on improving retrospectives. This book presents many techniques on how to gather data and generate insights in a retrospective. It also presents ideas on how to decide which ideas to implement immediately. This book offers good advice on how to lead retrospectives and is a must read for anyone who leads the retrospectives, mainly for any ScrumMaster. We used some of the ideas presented in this book and they worked great. We also plan to use more techniques presented in this book in upcoming retrospectives.

Looking forward for a very exciting year 2011. Wish everyone a very Happy and Prosperous New Year!

Managing dependencies in Maven

Managing dependencies in Maven, particularly managing the transitive dependencies and versions of the dependencies used can sometimes become a daunting task. Thankfully, there are some maven plugins and other resources to help in this. Just thought of sharing them in this post.

1. Intro to maven dependency management - An intro to maven dependency mechanism can be found here (http://www.mvnbrowser.com/index.html), which I just encountered today while trying to search for a missing dependency in my pom. POM report (http://www.mvnbrowser.com/pom-report.html) seems interesting. You can copy paste your POM or just the dependencies section and this would tell you what are the available versions for all dependencies in your POM and if you are using the latest one or not. It also lists what other dependencies are in your classpath. Seems like a simple UI version of what maven dependency and versions plugin does. Apart from this, it also lists the licenses involved. I have used this website very little as I just found it, but it seems useful.

I just mentioned the goals I use most. These plugins have many other useful goals as well, which you might want to explore. Try these maven goals in your maven projects and see for yourself the power of these maven plugins. Hope this post introduced you some new things to manage your maven dependencies and pointed you to some good resources.