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What's the Most Influential Coding Book Ever?

dev.to staff on June 22, 2023

Countless books have been written to guide and educate us in the realm of programming. But which one stands above all the rest as the most influent...
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Raunak Ramakrishnan

The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie

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Bernd Wechner

Beat me to it.

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Ben Halpern

Clean Code has to be up there

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Martin Stohanzl • Edited

Influencal yes, but good?
open.substack.com/pub/computerenha...

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Ben Halpern

I don’t disagree.

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Andrew Reese
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Bruce MacNaughton

The Mythical Man-Month is epic

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Libor Pansky

Good choice! I prefer Refactoring to Patterns over Refactoring by Fowler

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Oscar

Introduction to Algorithms
by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, Clifford Stein

Maybe not the most influential overall, but for the books that I have on programming, this tops all of them. Amazing diagrams, explanations, and a nice mix between conceptual ideas and mathematical ideas/proofs!

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D7460N

Don't Make Me Think
~ Steve Krug

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Frederico Americano Linhares

The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth

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Philip John Basile

For me it was CSS Zen Garden

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D7460N

Opened my eyes to "separation of concerns"

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Billy Shin

Art of Computer Programming.

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Steve Quezadas

Image description

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Ulises Serrano

Clean Architecture - Robert C. Martin

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Jaime López

Some of them has been named here, but "JavaScript: The Good Parts" is one of those that teaches you about how to use a programming language.

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Jaume

Personally I found Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code the most helpful book in my daily programming tasks. Although Test-Driven Development For Embedded C was the one that made me improve the most. Not only in C but in my programming methodology itself

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Mohamed209

For me " let us C "
If you are starting your journey in the field of computer science, this book is epic, it really helped me alot

https://books.google.com.eg/books/about/Let_Us_C.html?id=HrlIEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&gboemv=1&ovdme=1&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

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John Watts

Operating Systems - Design and Implementation
Andrew S. Tanenbaum

It essentially gave us Linux. Although we wouldn't have that without C so maybe second most influential.

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Brett Morrison
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Carlos Alberto • Edited

The most for me is:
The Art of Computer Programming
es.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_C...

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Libor Pansky

Code Complete
The Pragmatic Programmer
Design Patterns
Refactoring to Patterns
Operating Systems - Design and Implementation
Pro .NET Benchmarking

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Mohammed El-Afifi

modern c++ design by Andrei Alexandrescu

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Franky Braem
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xenva

An Grey Hat In Python Code Language by Justin Seitz as Well as Hacker Exploitation by Jon Erikson

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Stephen Dicks

Working with Legacy code - Michael Feathers

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Stephen Dicks

Developer Testing - bringing quality into software by Alexander Tarlin (yes almost no-one will have heard of that one)