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)
Oldest comments (4)
Here are some additional recommendations (many of the same)
wow! thanks for compiling!
It comes of being a former librarian - must organize the books!
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.