"Доверяй, но проверяй" ("Trust, but verify")
-- Russian Proverb
People are often wrong: we make bad bets, buy property before housing bubbles...
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You've got some excellent recommendations in there.
I don't think much of Robert Martin, but given your opening, I suppose an exception could be made. Trust but verify. The advice I hear time and again, at least from anyone who isn't a loyal disciple of Uncle Bob, is basically "read his work with a critical eye." Bring your own discernment so you can separate out objective fact from his own personal opinion...seeing as he generally can't. If you can do that, there's plenty of good ideas to be gleaned. (If you can't, there are plenty of other more objective books and articles on Clean Code/Architecture and Agile, which are valuable concepts in and of themselves.)
One book I don't see, but strongly recommend, is Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg. It's a chronicle of a real life open source project that, some might say, was fated from the start. It shows a lot of the concepts outlined in these books at play in real world software development stories. He cites Knuth, Weinberg, Raymond, and many others.
I'd also recommend The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond for anyone who wants to understand the philosophy and history of Open Source software. It's the watershed book that started the entire movement, so it's worth reading.
I'm always suspicious of lists like this that end up mostly Uncle Bob and Martin Fowler (or any other recognizable name in tech). No industry should be run on the words of a few people. It's cool to read their words and make your own observations, but that should be the goal of any reading rather than putting power in the hands of influencers.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar is an awesome book!
Thanks for recommending Dreaming in Code. It's on my reading list.
Thanks for the recommendations, Jason. I'll add them to my to-read list!
A MUST have to read in the bookshelf of any developers is The Phoenix Project
In fact this book should be read by anyone working in a company that produces software, this is not a book just for the DevOps guy.
I'm always suspicious of lists that recommend The Art of Computer Programming. Having spent more than 100 hours on volume one without finishing it, I can say that Knuth's own estimation that fewer than 100 people have read it end-to-end is probably true.
Each one of these books in valuable and every developer should probably read some of them, but each "high-theory" book you read is time taken away from learning practical, hands-on skills. I'm glad I read the top three back when all I was sacrificing was quality time with Access 2 and Visual Basic 3.
Just for anyone interest The Pragmatic Progammer book had its 20th anniversary edition, that have a more fresh and update view of todays world.
Taken from another dev.to post:
And in my opinion this SHOULD be the first book for a developer to read.
Do not read "The Art of Computer Programming". It is the "War and Peace" of computer science.
It is a shame it will never be finished. It is already a masterpiece of programming principles.
It is however not easy to grok. This is something you should read on a nice autumn Sunday afternoon with a whiskey, when you are 20-30 years into your career.
I tried to read it and it's so dry I am now a shrivelled husk of my former self. Note that inclusion on this list doesn't mean I personally recommend these books, just that other people seem to like them.
I agree, lamentably. I read the 1/3 of the first volume, and I that was as far as I could slog through.
So even if a book is only "12.5% recommended", it means that, on average, 1 out of every 8 developers has read that book and recommends it to other developers.
It means that 1 out of every 8 people who published the lists you chose recommends it. Not the same thing.
Good list, anyway.
Yeah that's fair enough. If you assume that the reading habits / taste in books of developers who write these lists aren't significantly different from those who don't, though, then they're a representative sample of the whole. Maybe I should put the word approximately in there somewhere...
Not to pick nits, but I assume that the kind of people who write this kind of lists read a lot of programming books, probably more than non-list writers. So, again, the 1/8 and such only really applies to the list writers, not devs as a whole. As a sample, it might be representative of which books are more popular, but not of the absolute amount of non-list writers who have read and recommended the books.
I still like the article, though.
You got the first 2 positions the other way around.
First you need to read The Pragmatic Programmer book, and then the Clean Code book, because Clean Code references the Pragmatic Programmer several times.
Pragmatic Programmer 20th edition! Awesome.
Mine hasn't been delivered yet! Pre-ordered though 😎
Same. I'm waiting for the hardcover which should ship in 2 weeks. I wonder what has changed from the original.
Another book that anyone should read, is The Bottleneck Rules, and its free.
This book will show you why the bottleneck may not be where everyone sees it is, but instead is somewhere else in the pipeline of your organization.
From GoogReads:
This is a book that is quick to read and it will change the way you look into bottlenecks, not only the ones in the organizations, but the ones in your code.
It really changes the way you look into stuff.
I actually came back to this list after the Sonmez's story, and after reading your Should we separate the artist from its art? article @awwsmm .
It's interesting to see, and unfortunately not surprising, that most of these books are writing by old white men. Don't get me wrong, there are some great books in this list, books I own myself and that I enjoy. This is the industry we have, dominated by white dudes, who had the most exposure and opportunities over the years. It's only normal that they come up so often in a list like that.
However, I think, and I'm pretty sure @awwsmm will agree with that, we would all be better off promoting books from people coming from different origins. So, here a proposition, is it possible to make such a list while excluding people that already had a good amount of exposure and privilege? We've heard them, and for some in that list, we also know what kind of people they are. Just a thought.
Keep up the good work Andrew ❤️
Nice list. I also have a list of all time software engineer book at techread.dev
I do not have the habit of reading books ☹️. I lose patience a lot.
I enjoy live coding examples and conference talks.
I hope a list of best talks and videos be published as well for people like me 🙂
Thanks for taking the time to compile this list, I love these sort of data-driven listings, while they have their weaknesses (as noted in some of the comments) they are still valuable in understanding what is popular.
I'd be interested to see if you collated by year if the order of the recommendations changed. One of the issues with recommended book lists is that they tend to be self-reinforcing, people read books on someone's list and then recommend them.
A number of the books on the list are quite old in coding years, while this doesn't mean they don't deserve to remain on the list...I wonder if they would trend less highly given some sort of curve for recency of recommendation?
I thought about this as I was making this list, but wasn't able to find enough recommendation lists to do any sort of slicing. You could do something similar with data from big websites with lots of reviews like Amazon. Look at the frequency and median value of reviews over time, and weight more strongly a book with the same median rating, but more overall reviews in a given time period. That's a slightly different question than the one I was trying to answer in this post, though.
I like how this top 20 list was collated. Data Driven Book Recommendation (DDBR). :-)
Quite cool books are given here, but unfortunately, they will be as boring to a large enough circle of professionals as they are to beginners. Because in today's world, there is more value in various courses, which are much more effective in squeezing out information. Take automation testing courses, and for example, they are more effective than any book, any of them.
Great post! I always thought that quote came from Ronald Reagan! Trust but verify - good advice.
Thanks a lot.. I have enjoyed this.
Thanks !
Thanks!
I'm just curious. Which library is that from the image?
That is The Long Room in the Old Library at Trinity College in Dublin.
Great list! Amazon's wish list and buy one every month. 😀
This is a good list of books. Some to add Psychology of Everyday Things, About Face for design. And of course ours Essential Software Development Career + Technical Guide :)
I've read both "Head First Design Patterns" and the Gang-of-Four, but the patterns book I recommend most is "Design Patterns Explained" by Shalloway and Trott.
Awesome list of books here!
I know I might not able to digest some of it, but I'll try reading them anyways.
So thank for sharing! 🙂
What would be the recommended reading order of these statistically most recommended development books?
What about system design? any recommendation? Which one will be good?
Thanks for these recommendations.
Thank you for the list of recommended books to read.