If you're a software developer, and you're concerned with how you'll fit in with today's IT landscape of outsourcing, offshoring, and being considered merely a cost center, you should pony up a few bucks and buy a new book that will give you real advice on how to move your career forward instead of looking over your shoulder. It's called My Job Went to India (And All I Got Was This Lousy Book): 52 Ways To Save Your Job.

Its author is one of my best friends, Chad Fowler, and it's published by Pragmatic Bookshelf.

OK, so I'm shilling my friends book. Yes, I'm extremely proud of Chad. Yes, I'm mentioned in this book a flattering way. But that's obviously not why you should buy it.

I doubt I can convince you any better than this quote from Alan Francis:

The book is, in my head at least, a companion volume to Pragmatic Programmer. PragProg gave a list of concrete advice for programmers to improve their programming. MJWTI (as the new book is affectionately known) gives a list of good concrete advice for programmer to improve everything else that makes them employable. Couched in terms of "how to avoid your job being outsourced", it's really about how to make yourself a more useful and valuable member of a team or organisation.

I agree completely.

This might be overstating it, but speaking for myself, I think of MJWTI as Pragmatic Programmer II: After the Dot-Com Era.