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5 books every developer must read before it's too late

Srebalaji Thirumalai on May 12, 2020

Hey Devs One thing most people won't regret is reading a good book. As the title suggests, I will suggest five books that you will never regret r...

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Cesar Aguirre • May 12 '20

Also, I would recommend Clean Coder. It isn't about code per se, it's about all things related to coding itself: estimates, saying no...

Freddy Hidalgo-Monchez • Jun 3 '20 • Edited

I really enjoyed "The Passionate Programmer" and I don't think it gets mentioned enough. A few interesting takeaways:

know 3 types of languages: mature, experimental, and half-way
specializing in a business domain > specializing in a tech stack
you only improve by surrounding yourself with better engineers so embrace feeling lost and confused

Lasse Schultebraucks • May 12 '20

Nice list.
Before reading Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture I would suggest to read a book about Design Patterns like the classic "Design Patterns. Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" by Erich Gamma.

Srebalaji Thirumalai • May 12 '20

Agreed.

Héctor Valls • May 13 '20

I would include Eric Evan's book Domain Driven Design in the list. I consider every developer should know concepts like bounded context or ubiquitous language and appreciate their importance when developing a product

Oziel Perez • May 14 '20

Good job recommending books on the process of writing code and not programming languages themselves. Books that teach a programming language might be valuable if you plan to only specialize on that language, but most of the times you can get by with what you learn from tutorials, official docs, etc. With books like these though, you can apply the concepts to every language. Writing clean code, implementing patterns, organizing code into architectures and refactoring are all important for easier maintenance of applications, especially when working with teams.

Rob OLeary • May 19 '20 • Edited

I recently read the 25th anniversary edition of The Pragmatic Programmer and was disappointed. Maybe, it was because I had previously read 2 similar books, which cover different aspects of making software. I prefer the style of these authors-books a lot more: