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What are your must-read programming books?

Ben Halpern on January 11, 2017

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Mohamed Oun

Currently reading Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug.
It's an excellent book on UX that I think is important for all developers (especially front-end) and designers.

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Mario Sangiorgio

In addition to the many good suggestions already posted I'd recommend Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann.

It's very good if you're interested in distributed systems.

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Aymeric A

Robert C. Martin
Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

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Carlos Gant

I fourth that

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Thomas Melville

Here here

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Oli Oskar

I second that

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Cristian Sima

Really good book

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Brian Driscoll

I third that.

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James Hood

Distributed counting is hard. 😜

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Nitish Dayal

JavaScript:
Essential JavaScript - Solid introduction to JavaScript and common programming principles
Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja, 2nd Edition - Function context, closures, ES6, oh my!
Learning JavaScript Design Patterns - Because fundamentals are good, and you should work on them.

Swift:
The Swift Programming Language (ie: the docs!) - It's literally the docs. That's how conversational the documentation for Swift is; they took it and put it in a book and it actually reads like one. 10/10 pretty much my only resource for learning Swift.

Python:
Learn Python The Hard Way - It's. Uh. Amazing.
Learning Django Web Development - Django documentation is great tbh, but it can be a little overwhelming given how deep every section goes. This book is a solid way to gain clarity on some of the verbose sections in the documentation.

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shitpost_​​​​​​​bot

"Learn Python the Hard Way" teaches you all the wrong lessons in the wrong way. I learned using those books, and unfortunately had to relearn most of the lessons taught to me from that and "Learn C The Hard Way". Try "Dive Into Python".

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Rahul Sharma

I second that. Learn Python The Hard Way introduces a lot of noise and unnecessary stuff which you might never use in the future. Also, the examples are boorish and make no sense.

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Ben Halpern

Great list 👏

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Nitish Dayal

Written in order of recommendation per topic. Eloquent JS is a great lead-in into SotJS (which has become my favorite JS book), and once you've got a firm grasp on those core concepts understanding the various implementations of modules and stuff is covered pretty well in Learning JavaScript Design Patterns. Swift docs genuinely are as awesome as I hype them up to be.

Python, if Learn Python the Hard Way is too much, 'Automate the Boring Stuff w/ Python' is more interactive.

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Brian Driscoll

Definitely all of the following:

  1. Clean Code by Robert Martin
  2. Design Patterns Explained by Shalloway and Trott
  3. Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

My "good to read" list includes:

  1. Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers
  2. More Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky
  3. Smart and Gets Things Done by Joel Spolsky
  4. Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
  5. Return on Software by Steve Tockey
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Chris Hartjes

I am on my second, dog-eared copy of The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. Cannot recommend this book enough as a blueprint for your minimal skills base

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Claudio Rodriguez

This one is great for any developer

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eric casteleijn

TDD by Example, by Kent Beck. This is the one programming book I go back to every few years, and even though it's not a huge book, I always come away with something new.

Refactoring, by Martin Fowler. Though I don't revisit this one quite as often (except maybe to look up one of the less common recipes, I think it's still a book ever programmer should read at least once.)

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Cristian Sima

Both of them are excelent pieces.

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Mohamed Oun

Definitely The Pragmatic Programmer. So many priceless tips.

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Thomas Melville

Just finished reading it and I know I'll be going back to it periodically.
So many useful tips!

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Netanel Ravid

Second to recommend it, what a great book!

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George • Edited

Got quiet a few

1: Learning Java (Patrick Niemeyer& Jonathan Knudsen)
2: Clean Code (Robert C. Martin)
3: Java Pocket Guide (Robert Liguori & Patricia Liguori)
4: Elements of Programming (Alexander A. Stepanov, Paul McJones · Addison-Wesley)
5: Debian GNU/Linux (Heike Jurzik · Rheinwerk Verlag GmbH)
6: Linux Bible (Christoper Negus)

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Manas Ranjan Dash • Edited

I wrote this blog on my #must-read list

medium.com/@simplymanas/books-for-...

  • Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship (Robert C. Martin) Code Complete Paperback by Steve
  • Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler (Author), Kent Beck (Author), John Brant (Author), William Opdyke (Author), Don Roberts (Author)
  • Test Driven Development: By Example By Kent Beck
  • The Art of Unit Testing: with examples in C# by Roy Osherove
  • Design Patterns: Elements Of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Gamma
  • Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture By Martin Fowler
  • The Pragmatic Programmer By Hunt
  • Microsoft.NET Architecting Applications for the Enterprise 2 by Dino Esposito and Andrea Saltarello
  • Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation (Addison-Wesley Signature Series)
  • RESTful Web APIs By Leonard Richardson and Mike Amundsen with Foreword by Sam Ruby
  • Adaptive Code via C#: Agile coding with design patterns and SOLID principles
  • Effective Java (2nd Edition) Paperback — by Joshua Bloch (Author)
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Vanessa Ejikeme

You don't know JS by Kyle Simpson
Eloquent Javascript
Professional JavaScript for Web Developers by Nicholas C Zakas

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Ben Halpern

Between Eloquent Javascript and Professional JavaScript for Web Developers, which should I read first?

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Bug

Eloquent Javascript

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Tariq Ali

Software Engineering by Ian Sommerville. This is not a book about writing code. It is instead about all the non-technical aspects of programming, such as the trade-offs of code reuse, managing risks to projects, dealing with complex "socio-political systems", and handling ethical dilemmas. It's a college textbook but it has practical advice for dealing with real-world situations, and it is the first book that I read that made me scared for programming. Even the textbook questions at the end of each chapter can give me pause.

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Ben Halpern

Oh, this sounds great.

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Dominique Schapal
  • Dependency Injection in .NET (Seemann, Mark)
  • Domain-Driven Design (Evans, Eric)
  • Ry's Git Tutorial (Hodson, Ryan)
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Josh Cheek • Edited

For testing: the RSpec book. I know it's old and dated, but nothing made it click for me like that book did.

For understanding programming: the Elements of Computing Systems. Amazing book (people are calling it "Nand to Tetris" these days). That book is the reason I understand hardware (the big patterns, not like all the nuances of modern complex hardware).

For Ruby: The Pickaxe and Ruby Under a Microscope. The pickaxe is shockingly practical. I wasted so much effort trying to learn stuff that was in that book. A lot of it is just docs, too, which makes it thick and scary, but the first half is a wonderful collection of super practical information. Ruby Under a Microscope is basically "how does Ruby work", pick that one up if you're writing Ruby based on syntactic patterns you've seen and you want to actually understand why anything does what it does.

The book Absolute Java was wonderful when I read it, too. At that time, I was very new, so their lengthy explanations of how things worked were very useful and enlightening. Now it's an obvious / boring read for me, but I'm not its audience any more. So if you've got less than a year or two of experience, this book does a good job of helping you understand how language level stuff are implemented. If you've never worked with a typed language before, it's also worth reading for that reason (any typed language will be good for your programming brain, it will make explicit and obvious a class of errors and ways of thinking that dynamic languages leave implicit).

I'm sure there are others, but my books are in storage.

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Jdraiv

The Pragmatic Programmer.
The Mythical Man-Month.

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Patrick Tingen

I really loved Steve McConnell's Code Complete

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James Hood

+1. Such a great book!

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Markus Müller

Erlang
for newcomer:

  • Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good! (Fred Hébert)
  • Erlang and OTP in Action (Martin Logan und Eric Merritt) for advanced:
  • Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP (Francesco Cesarini und Steve Vinoski)
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Speedmaster

Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley. Code Complete by Steve McConnell. The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie. The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. Writing Solid Code. Writing Solid Code by Steve Maguire.

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Daniel Donbavand
  • Code Complete
  • C# in Depth
  • Clean Code
  • C# in a Nutshell
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Wilson Campusano Jorge
  • clean code
  • the clean coder
  • design patterns
  • Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman
  • Test Driven: TDD and Acceptance TDD for Java Developers
  • Test-Driven Development: A Practical Guide: A Practical Guide
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Ju Gonçalves

By far, it's Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/bo...).

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Neil Madden

Release It! by Michael T. Nygard - lots of solid advice on building robust systems.

Effective Java - does what it says on the tin.

Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming by Peter Norvig - the content is out of date, but one of the best books on programming I've ever read.

Essentials of Programming Languages (1st edition) by Friedman, Wand and Haynes. My first introduction to Scheme and Lisp many years ago and it blew me away.

Concepts Techniques and Models of Computer Programming - Peter Van Roy and Seif Haridi. Comprehensive coverage of pretty much every programming paradigm ever invented. It's a big book!

Other good older books that I learned a lot from: ML for the Working Programmer, The Craft of Prolog, Practical Programming in Tcl/Tk.

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Bogdan Galiceanu

"Dependency Injection in .NET" by Mark Seemann. It teaches you so much more than what the title says.

"C# in Depth" and "C# in a Nutshell" are very good.

As a non-techincal book but excellent nonetheless, "The Clean Coder" by Uncle Bob.

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Steven Liekens

+1 for DI in .NET. That book helps me deal with coworkers who have learned one of the many DI antipatterns and misconceptions. Must read for anyone who is learning about DI, no matter what language they use.

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boo radley

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture - our goto resource for breaking down development and design problems.

Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and David Farley. One of the best books for clearly justifying the costs and processes of CI/CD patterns to non-IT people.

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Bryan Baldwin

The C Programming Language, Second Edition
The Practice of Programming
The Unix Programming Environment
C Unleashed
21st Century C
Autotools: A Practitioner's Guide to GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool

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Jennifer

The Art of Computer Programming

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution Good insight into how great programmers think.

Code Complete

Hakmem

As much as you can afford on your primary programming language. You may find that answer to a vexing problem in only one book.

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Ben Halpern

Nice list

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PHP and cigars • Edited
  • Software Engineering by Ian Sommerville.
  • Clean Code by Robert C. Martin.
  • The Art of War by Sun Tzu. I don't have a project manager. So this book helps me to decide with features to implement next.
  • Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister.
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Vincent Grovestine

C: How to Program (Deitel & Deitel)

It was the book used in my core Computer Science classes some 20+ years ago; and it remains the standard by which I judge all programming books. Clear, concise, easy-reading, plenty of examples; an absolute pleasure to learn from!

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Daniel

It's not about programming but definitely can help with development-related or documentation stuff:

Practical Typography by Matthew Butterick

Basically it's a book about writing professional documents properly. And it's "free".

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Hal Incandenza

For Beginners: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, by Abelson and Sussman.

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Gary Sieling

"Relevant Search" is a good, practical book on solr/elastic search

I like "Natural Language Processing with Python" as an introduction to text processing problems (techniques are dated but I thought the examples were helpful)

Code Complete is a good general coding book

"Secrets of the javascript ninja" and "3rd party javascript" taught me a lot about javascript, and tend to have a lot of practical lessons

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István Lantos • Edited
  • The Go Programming Language (Alan A. A. Donovan, Brian W. Kernighan)
  • Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++, 2nd Edition (B. Stroustrup)
  • JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition (David Flanagan)
  • The C Programming Language, 2nd edition (Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. Ritchie)

These are all crazily well-written introduction books for their respective languages. I think either you choose to start with these books, or you crazy enough not to... And wear the consequences, because one day you have to read them in your career.

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David Oesterreich

Pragmatic Programmer and Code Complete.

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Gfred
  • Programming Pearls
  • Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
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Mohammad Mehdi Habibi

1) Interchange learning English series of Cambridge to learn English first.
2) Introduction to Algorithms or foundations of Algorithms
3) Any books for learning Assembly
4) Software engineering (Pressman)

Then depending on which field or language you prefer books vary. But starting with C++ is always good.

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Adrian B.G.

All 3 Clean ... by Robert C. Martin (uncle bob) books, After 2-3 yrs of experience.

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series) Martin Fowler (Author). You will not be afraid after this to work with legacy code.

For JavaScript Nicholas C. Zakas books

I do not recommend learning a programming language from a book, do an interactive course (like Udacity platform, Khan Academy or gamification platform like codingwars), OR read a book but stop after each 10-30 pages and practice.

Like cooking or any other craft you need to practice it in order to learn it.

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Jason C. McDonald

"Dreaming in Code" by Scott Rosenberg should be read by anyone who works with tech in any capacity.

"Game Programming Patterns" by Robert Nystrom, meanwhile, should be read by any coder with a pulse. :)

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Martin Kraetke

For XML-oriented functional programmers, I would recommend these books:

XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0
by Michael Kay

XSLT Cookbook. Solutions and Examples for XML and XSLT Developers
by Sal Mangano

as an aside: forget XSLT 1.0. XSLT 2.0 and 3.0 are real fun.

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Nick Selvaggio

The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks.

A timeless classic in various aspects to software engineering and project management.

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Rayy Benhin

Eloquent JavaScript
Introduction to Algorithms 3rd Edition

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Guilherme Ferreira

Soft Skills: The Software Developer's Life Manual from @jsonmez

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Enno Rehling (恩諾)

"Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael C. Feathers, and "C++ Coding Standards" by Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu.

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Tamás Szelei

All from Scott Meyers.

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Anton Frattaroli

The manual?

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Chris Pickard

Effective Java

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Nivesh

Javascript:

Books:

  • Javascript: The Good Parts,
  • Javascript Design Patterns.

Articles:

  • Airbnb Style Guide,
  • Clean code in JS,
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Gonzalo

The Practice of Programming
The Pragmatic Programmer
The Art of UNIX Programming

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Nicolay Velizhanin

Code Complete Second Edition by Steve McConnell

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Guilherme Ferreira

Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C# also from @unclebobmartin

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Steve Bennett

Growing Object Oriented Software Guided by Tests
Nat Pryce and Steve Freeman

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Reza Dehganpour

Any good book about continues integration and continues deployment?

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Mitch Pronschinske

"Code Simplicity: The Fundamentals of Software" by Max Kanat-Alexander

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yeedle

Java: Effective Java
C#: C# In Depth
JavaScript: You Don't Know JS series
[Haskell: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good]

General: Clean Code, The Mythical Man-Month

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Cristian Stroparo
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Albert

1.Pragmatic Programming
2.Mythical Myth
3.Clean code

These are the three books I have read so far which are very informative

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Akeel Haider

You don't know JS(Kyle Simpson)?

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Diane Chen

Python:
Think Python by Allen B. Downey - Especially good for new programmers.
Fluent Python by Luciano Ramalho - Good for those moving to Python from other languages.

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Aaron ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm surprised no one's mentioned anything about books on shader code. I'm compiling a list and its the only thing missing so far :(

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Aaron ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I apologize because these aren't books, but I think they deserve an honorable mention (forgive me!).

For shaders:
The Book of Shaders - thebookofshaders.com/ - (not really a book)
WebGL Fundamentals - webglfundamentals.org/

For graphics:
LunarXchange by Valve - vulkan.lunarg.com/sdk/home - host of VulkanSDK and tutorials and tools on how to implement Vulkan in C++
Open.GL - open.gl/
OpenGL Turotial - opengl-tutorial.org/

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Bert Van Vreckem
  • Clean Code, Robert C. Martin
  • Practical Object Oriented Programming, Sandi Metz
  • Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Abelson & Sussman
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Hannes Calitz

The clean coder by Uncle Bob Martin

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Computing Savvy

I am currently reading "C Programming Absolute Beginner’s Guide" a best book for learning C programming.
computingsavvy.com/books/free-down...

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Aidas Bendoraitis

"Building Scalable Web Sites" by Cal Henderson.

"Python 201 - Intermediate Python" by Michael Driscoll.

And of course "Web Development with Django Cookbook - Second Edition" by me. :)

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Integralist
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Simon Bäumer

The Pragmatic Programmer
Head First: Design Patterns
Refactoring - Improving the design of existing code

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Vicente Jr Yuchitcho

Grokking Algorithms by Aditya Bhargava. Really good even for non CS people.

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Alireza Habibi

Being Geek and Team Geek are my favorite.

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Ben Wolf

The art of readable code.
Not focussing on any tech/language, but on general thoughts, ideas and tips regarding how to write beautiful code. :-)