Free / Open Source Software

Generally wonderful books about FOSS

• The Productive Programmer - what are the tools in your toolkit and how do you use them? how do you judge tools, and how do you decide what's right for you? how do you make it your own?
• Beautiful Code - case studies with reflective writing, not a pattern book: "The authors think aloud as they work through their project's architecture, the tradeoffs made in its construction, and when it was important to break rules."
• Beautiful Architecture - reflective writing plus scaffolding: "In each essay, contributors present a notable software architecture, and analyze what makes it innovative and ideal for its purpose. ... [some] take a step back to investigate how certain architectural aspects have influenced computing as a whole."

Coderspeak

What is coderspeak? Our modern 'programming' languages are not designed primarily with human to computer communication in mind, but to mediate human to human communication distributed in space and time, even when the communicatings have a very definite 'message in a bottle' feel to them.

Why do some of these languages have a much stronger coderspeak flavor than others? That good writing is a result of re-writing is an axiom, and re-writing is valuable not as window-dressing, but because it clarifies thought. Languages that are still somewhat emergent as coderspeak (JavaScript would be a great example) often reflect tremendous ongoing growth in understanding on the part of the relevant community, not weak language design. -- HilaryHolz - 03 Feb 2009

Languages

• JaVa
• JavaScript
• PhP
• PyThon
• R (RisCool) - a language for working with data, Pioneered within the stats community, also used widely within Pattern Recognition
• RuBy - pure Object Oriented scripting language
• PerL

Agile Tools

looking at agile tools within a language

• AgileR
• PythonBestPracticesFastTrack - An agile shortcut through Tarek's Python Best Practices book.

Infrastructure tools

• XeN - virtualization
• YuM - package updater

Skills development

Neal Ford's The Productive Programmer (UsingSafariBooks) is not only a wonderful compendium of tips on becoming more productive, but will help the attentive reader learn to recognize agile tools.