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Max Ong Zong Bao
Max Ong Zong Bao

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What was Your Book That Shape You

While I'm awaiting in anticipation for my The Pragmatic Programmer: your journey to mastery, 20th Anniversary Edition book to arrive through mail.

I'm wondering what is the book that had made a huge impact on your life? For me it was by far 4 Hour Work Week that had played a huge role in my life.

Which had shaped me in becoming a voracious reader of books. It had even allowed me to embark on the path of entrepreneurship & startups after more than a decade in reading it.

So what was the "book" that had made a huge impact on your life?

Latest comments (60)

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steelwolf180 profile image
Max Ong Zong Bao • Edited

Haha, that's great to me Rich Dad, Poor Dad is a gateway towards the drive to learn and raising financial intelligence and becoming an entrepreneur. Which lead to me making tons of choice to shape and help into who I am now. Which started with 4 Hour Work Week.

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Filipe

Good Topic!

The book that was more valuable to me was "The Software Craftsman" by Sandro Mancuso, it helped me a lot in become a better programmer.

I really want to read 4 Hour Work Week too, it looks a great book.

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steelwolf180 profile image
Max Ong Zong Bao

Yup, it was despite it's dated its concept is good :) which was mindset changing to me.

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Melanie Phillips

I recently finished "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl. Some of it gets a bit technical for his field but it isn't overwhelming. It can be applied to any situation and will stick with me for the rest of my life.

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MurrayVarey

Tough (and great) question. Recently it's Show Your Work by Austin Kleon. It gave me confidence to stop hiding -- it's the reason I joined Dev.to. Even the title is inspiring.

And I second/third/fourth The Pragmatic Programmer. The first programming book I properly read, and still the best.

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steelwolf180 profile image
Max Ong Zong Bao • Edited

Nice i read a older copy 6 or 8 years ago and i always wanted to buy one after i had loan it from the library.

So now it was a good chance to get it.

When i heard it in "Test & Code" episode that they had released a new edition and this lead me to crowd source the book with 3 others to have it delivered to Singapore to reduce on the delivery cost of the book.

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MurrayVarey

Who read it first?

I credit Pragmatic Programmer for making me question the purpose of everything. Which is a weird thing to say about a software development book ...

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martin rojas

To me, it has been the Phoenix Project. This is has a ton of good information in a great story format and honestly, it feels like it has every bad practice I run on corporate environments and how to fix them.

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steelwolf180 profile image
Max Ong Zong Bao

Nice I wanted to get my hands on that book especially in the area of DevOps It's quite a popular book.

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Nico S___

Here are some books I've found very useful:

The Manager's Path, by Camille Fournier bookdepository.com/Manager-s-Path-...
She describes the career path from Senior Developer to Manager, what you might encounter and what you need to learn at each step. Is very useful to me since Im on that career path.

Accelerate, by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim, et al bookdepository.com/Accelerate-Nico...
This is a great research, with actionable advice, about how to run Dev Ops, and the real impact it has in businesses.

Currently reading An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management, by Will Larson amazon.com/Elegant-Puzzle-Systems-...
This one is a bit for management a bit more advanced that where I am now, but is great to start looking into the future if I progress in this path

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Canu667

The Manager's Path - this... I would give you another upvote if I could. If I only had read it earlier... It is not only an insight into what will you face on each career step, but also gives you some pointers, what you should expect from your managers and higher-ups. While reading the whole TL chapter, I felt as the author just took it from my life...

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Max Ong Zong Bao • Edited

That's really nice :) will look at it and devour it fully :)

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steelwolf180 profile image
Max Ong Zong Bao

Nice I had heard of the managers path it was like a recommended book for developers working towards it.

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Trystan

The design of everyday things. I've never looked at human interfaces the same since - understanding that a clever solution is the not the same thing a usable one.

Also helped me remember I'm not an idiot because it took me a few minutes to figure out how the bizarre taps worked in my new office's bathroom.

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Max Ong Zong Bao

Haha don't worry I actually had trouble in using my hostel's tap when I was in Scotland.

I had never used taps with hot and cold taps in my life.

As in Singapore we only had one for our home and the public toilets.

It took me a while to figure it out on getting the right temperature for my water in the morning.

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Omer Hamerman

A bit of spirituality: "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle, is one of the most life-changing books I've ever read. I've repeated parts of it 4-5 times. Life-changing perspectives and concepts we seem to be "unconscious" to (sticking with Eckhart's terminology).

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Cesar Aguirre

These two books have made a lot of impact in my developer career so far: Clean Code and The Art of Readable Code

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Max Ong Zong Bao

Nice that is really cool. Clean code sort of recommended read for alot of developers.

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Daniel Thompson-Yvetot

I think the book that had the biggest impact on me was the ZeroMQ guide.
zguide.zeromq.org/page:all

pic

Not only did it really make me aware of distributed architecture, it also went into great depth about open source organizational hygiene. Can't recommend it enough.

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Max Ong Zong Bao

It seems there are tons of puns nice!!!

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nothingismagick profile image
Daniel Thompson-Yvetot

:D

Now this looks too simple to be realistic, but ZeroMQ sockets have, as we already learned, superpowers. You could throw thousands of clients at this server, all at once, and it would continue to work happily and quickly. For fun, try starting the client and then starting the server, see how it all still works, then think for a second what this means.