I’m just getting ready to ship my first piece of software (keep an eye our for it) and I thought ‘Ship It!’ by the ‘Pragmatic Programmers’ would be a pertinent read. That’s the only place I’d fault it, where I thought it would be about getting your project off the ground; instead it’s about steering you in the right direction - nonetheless I learnt a great deal from it. I’ve enjoyed their other publications and always look forward to learning something new. Briefly summarized it’s a book in two halves; things that you Really Should Be Doing, then the why and the how. There’s also a handy tips sheet at the end which highlights the main points of the book.

Release It is a great book if your day job, like mine, is to create enterprise systems that integrate lots of sub-systems. The author clearly states “I’ve targeted this book at architects, designers, and developers of enterprise-class software systems—this includes websites, web services, and EAI projects, among others.” For an Indie Mac developer or an up-and-coming iPhone developer, unless what you’re making is enterprise-class software that needs to integrate with lots of sub-system, you probably want to give this book a miss.

Pragmatic Version Control: Using Subversion By Mike mason is a great introduction to using Subversion, covering many aspects in great detail. This book provides a really useful resource for beginners and more advanced users alike. The book spans many topics from setting up a repository to advanced features such as merging branches, each one given a dedicated ‘recipe’ for use. The only real flaw with this book is the flow is occasionally spoilt by info boxes throughout the text, however despite this it will be a mainstay on my desk in the future!

Pragmatic Version Control Using Git provides a good overview and introduction to using Git for version control. The book covers all the basic concepts of distributed version control systems (DVCS), and provides a hands-on guide to all the basic Git features, and some advanced ones. The book is well written, in general the examples are useful and serve to clearly illustrate the points, and the book provides enough information to get started and exploring on your own. It does not contain a lot of advanced usage of Git, nor is it a Git reference tome, but after reading it, you will have enough knowledge to dig through the ample git documentation and discover all the functionality that is not described in the book.