Late last year I was spending a lot of time on trains between T.O and Montreal, on one trip I picked up this book and was thoroughly engrossed - Refactoring - Martin Fowler is one of those simply must-have books on any developers bookshelf. Of all technical books I’ve found it to be the one that actually compels you to be a better programmer.

The first chunk of the book is dedicated to whats, whys, testing etc of how you should turn your mish-mash of spaghetti code into beautiful elegant world class code, the rest of the book is dedicated to a catalog of various examples of refactorings.

The great chapters.ca boat sailed into port - last week Essential Actionscript 3.0 by Colin Moock arrived on my doorstop. First impressions this is by far the biggest tech book to grace my shelves. 900+ pages worth, it dwarfs O’Reillys recently released Programming Flex 2 book.

This book really does cover everything from general programming skills to the nitty gritty of E4X useage. The work that has gone into this book by Mr Moock shows. Approximately the first ~350 pages of the book is devoted to Core Actionscript & OOP principles in general, the second half Flash/Flex features such as XML, Drawing API, Security etc. Coupled with the Programming Flex 2 book I really think that’s all you need for your bookshelf.

My learning style is to learn by example (I skim read text - but thoroughly read code to understand) which is covered off really well, the vast majority of pages have a short code fragment or diagram to complement the text along with longer full code examples where applicable.