Some people love programming books; some people hate them. I, clearly, am one of the former. And so while reading through the latest #DevDiscuss Twitter chat, I started taking note of which books were most recommended by DevDiscussers.
The following are the greatest hits, collected in an easy-to-browse format with links to Amazon.
The medalists: these three books had 5+ recommendations apiece.
- Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin
- Code Complete by Steve McConnell
- The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt
Books on project management and writing good code:
- The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers by Robert Martin
- Coders At Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming by Peter Seibel
- The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick Brooks
Books on refactoring and maintaining good code:
- Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler
- Refactoring To Patterns by Joshua Kerievsky
- Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers
Books on software architecture and design patterns (language-agnostic):
- 99 Bottles of OOP: A Practical Guide to Object-Oriented Design by Sandi Metz
- Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices by Robert Martin
- Domain Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software by Eric Evans
- High Performance Browser Networking by Ilya Grigorik (also available to read online)
- Just Enough Software Architecture: A Risk-Driven Approach by George Fairbanks
- Production-Ready Microservices: Building Standardized Systems Across an Engineering Organization by Susan Fowler
Non-technical books to inform your programming:
- The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh
- The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
- Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures As the World's Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin Mitnick
- The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson
Language-specific books:
- Eloquent Javascript by Marijn Haverbeke (also available to read online)
- If Hemingway Wrote Javascript by Angus Croll
- Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby: An Agile Primer by Sandi Metz
- Programming Ruby: the Pragmatic Programmer's Guide, aka the Pickaxe Ruby book, by Dave Thomas, Andy Hunt, and Chad Fowler
- You Don't Know JS series by Kyle Simpson (also available to read online)
Discussion (4)
High Perf Browser Networking: online edition > print as I'm not sure if print was updated with H2 chapter, which free online version has is. A must read.
Here are some additional recommendations (many of the same)
wow! thanks for compiling!
It comes of being a former librarian - must organize the books!