Book Club

See Join Us below for how to join.

Read Books Together

For over 4 years, I’ve led our community “Book Club” in reading, studying, and discussing various technical books. Since then, we’ve gotten together for a couple of hours (remotely over Zoom) almost every week to discuss a chapter (or sometimes two) of a technical book. Here’s a list of books that we’ve read so far:

• TDD by Example (Beck)
• Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Feathers)
• Domain-Driven Design (Evans)
• Implementing DDD (Vaughn)
• Object Design (Wirfs-Brock, McKean)
• Unit Testing: Principles, Practices, and Patterns (Khorikov)
• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
• Patterns of Software Architecture (we did a bunch from various POSA volumes)
• Learning Domain Driven Design (Khononov)
• The Programmer’s Brain (Hermans)

Current Book

We are reading Martin Fowler’s Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (2nd Edition):

Schedule

We meet virtually for 2 hours on Sundays starting at 18:00 UTC (10am PT, 1pm ET, 7pm CET) over Zoom, taking a 7-minute break around the 1-hour mark. Here’s the current reading and meeting schedule:

December 8, 2024 ⬅️ ⬅️

We’ll read the Change Function Declaration (124) recipe and more TBD.

(past sessions)

December 1 ✅

We started with the first few “Code Smells” of Chapter 3 and then read the Inline Function (115), Extract Variable (119), and Inline Variable (123) recipes.

November 24 ✅

We finished reading the rest of Chapter 2.

November 17 ✅

We finished the Split Phase refactoring recipe (page 154) and started the Chapter 2 discussion through page 55.

November 10 ⛔️

No meeting. Will meet again on November 17.

November 3 ✅

We finished Chapter 1 and dug into the Split Phase refactoring recipe.

October 27 ✅

Today was a shorter session as we finished the narrative section in Chapter 1 through page 31.

October 20 ✅

We dove into the Extract Function refactoring recipe and continued reading in Chapter 1.

October 13 ✅

We finished reading through page 23, discussing the decisions Fowler made in extracting the functions.

Hiatus

we took a break, but we’re back!

June 23 ✅

Our first session!

We did introductions and covered through around page 11.

Join Us

The Book Club is open to everyone, and there’s no pressure to show up at every session.

If you want to participate, join the Discord if you’re not already a member. Then: send a Direct Message to @JitterTed indicating that you want to join the book club. Please provide your full name so that I can make sure you’re a real person.