The question about which you dont like is way more harder to think of.

Personally I would add Groovy in Action and http://www.clean-code-developer.de :)

1. Holub on Patterns – Probably the best treatment on practical & good OO and design patterns

2. Bitter Java by Bruce Tate – Amazing treatment on anti-patterns

“I would add the question “what open source projects do you contribute to?” to the interview.”

From my experience there are – at least in Germany – not many developers contributing to open source projects.

Personally, i made the experience that judging knowledge by read books is often misleading. It’s more about applying the knowledge than having read the book. Reading is a start, though.

I would add the question “what open source projects do you contribute to?” to the interview. You get a code or communication sample for free when answered positively.

While the answers have varied pretty widely I believe in every instance where they haven’t come up wth *anything* they’ve been rejected, although not necessarily solely on those grounds.

Another one I’ve used for a long time is “What’s your language of the year?” If they have *no* idea what I’m talking about I’m immediately suspicious. Again, I don’t expect everybody to *have* a language of the year, but their response is usually pretty informative.

Nevertheless your point (to make a contribution here) – I think – is, to find out how people reflect on information and knowledge regarding their profession.

Perhaps two good starter questions would be:
– How did you keep yourself up-to-date in terms of skills and knowledge the last two years?
– Following: What books / web-sites / blogs / newsletters can (or can’t) you recommend then and why?

Thanks for the interesting thought!

Yes, I guess mentioning blogs, whitepapers etc is equally good than reading books.

I can only tell that
a) I learnt programming from newsletters, blogs, white papers, best practise sites
d) Even if I read a book, I tend to forget author and title. Might be because I have a very bad memory for abstract titles (for movie titles, blog titles, song titles AND book titles), but remember names quite well
c) I didn’t own any book about programming coming from university

Though I even in those times I was a better developer when I started to work than many of my fellow students.

I’m just thinking that this sort of questions ignores that people actually learn differently. I love books and I actually buy Computer Science books nowadays. But my main source of information remains abstracts, excerpts, newsletters, blogs, home pages etc.

What do you ask younger people like me? :-)

Stefan

Good idea. I’ll steal that one :-)

Personally, my number 1 book is Kent Beck’s “Extreme Programming Explained”. It is logically consistent which is too often not common in software development literature.

Second, how about this question: “What books don’t you like?”. I think the ability to intelligently criticize software-related writing is a highly desired virtue.

Finally, here’s another question along these lines: “What blogs do you follow?”