As we do every year, Dr. Dobb's recognizes the best books of the last 12 months via the Jolt Awards  our cycle of product awards given out every two months in each of six categories. No category gets more entrants than books, and this year was no exception with more than 30 nominees submitted by publishers, vendors, readers, and the Jolt judges themselves. The award covers all books published during the twelve months ending June 30th of this year.
The Jolt judges did an initial triage that reduced the field to a readable number of entrants. Then, there followed a second pass in which the top books were selected and ranked  after long deliberation and considerable discussion. As always, the best book of the year receives the Jolt Award; the two runners up each receive a Jolt Productivity award; and the remaining three books are awarded Jolt Finalist status. Reviews of these six volumes are included in this article.
The judges for this category were Andrew Binstock, Jonathan Harley, Gastón Hillar, David Mulcihy, Larry O'Brien, Gary Pollice, Roland Racko, Mike Riley, and Gigi Sayfan. Given the many nominees and the large number of judges, you can have high confidence that the award winners represent the very best of the books published in the 12-month award period.
We thank Jolt sponsor, Rackspace, for providing virtual machines for the judges' use in examining and testing the code and tools discussed in these books.