Greg Wilson has an interesting new post with some of the recommendations he made to a friend about recommended reading for a software engineering teacher so they could be one step ahead of their students.

I got mail yesterday from a former student of a friend of mine who has just been told that he has to teach an "Intro to Software Engineering" class this fall to a bunch of third-year undergraduates. He’s not an SE guy—his background is operating systems—so he asked me what he should read to get one step ahead of his future students. As regular readers will know, I don’t think much of most traditional software engineering books: I’ve never seen most of what’s in them in the real world, and most of what I’ve needed to know hasn’t been in them.

Included in his books of recommended reading are things like:

• Making Software (of which he's an author)
• Karl Fogel's Producing Open Source Software
• Working Effectively with Legacy Code (from Michael Feathers)
• The Architecture of Open Source Applications

Take a look at the full post for the rest of his list and a bit about why he chose each.