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Discussion on: 20 Most-Recommended Books for Software Developers

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald • Edited

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.

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Firoz Ansari

Thanks for recommending Dreaming in Code. It's on my reading list.

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Andrew (he/him)

Thanks for the recommendations, Jason. I'll add them to my to-read list!

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Leonardo Furtado

The Cathedral and the Bazaar is an awesome book!

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ItsASine (Kayla)

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.

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