When I teach testing, I pull from my experience and knowledge learned from reading a wide variety of sources. I don’t have a book that goes along with the material, just some disheveled powerpoint. At least one person per class asks for a recommendation of a book or books that will help them in their career. Quite frankly, I don’t know what to tell them. So I’m going to take a different tact on it the problem.

If you had a completely blank slate, which dead treesbooks would you buy to stock the bookshelf of a test team?

This first list I have read and / or recommended to people.

  • Lessons Learned in Software Testing (Bach, Kaner, Pettichord)
  • Programming Perl (Wall, Christiansen, Orwant)
  • Programming Ruby (Thomas)
  • Programming Python (Lutz)
  • xUnit Test Patterns (Meszaros)
  • Clean Code (Martin)
  • Agile Testing (Crispin, Gregory)
  • Bridging the Communications Gap (Adzic)

This next one are ones I have (or would if the publisher would send them to me) but have not read. They certainly hold promise though.

  • How We Test Software at Microsoft (Page, Johnson, Rollison) – got
  • Designing Accessible Websites (Sydik) – got
  • Exploratory Software Testing (Whittaker) – in its way
  • Agile Retrospectives (Derby, Larsen) – want
  • Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum (Cohn) – want
  • Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love (Pichler) – want

So what would you add? I know I am missing a good, non-vendor specific book on SQL and Unix. As well as something on Security.