I’ve spent most of my life writing code—and too much of that life teaching new programmers how to write code like a professional. If it’s true that you only truly understand something after teaching it to someone else, then at this point I must really understand programming! Unfortunately, that understanding has not led to an endless stream of bug-free code, but it has led to some informed opinions on programming and books about programming.
I wrote
The Rules of Programming: How to Write Better Code
This book’s title is absolutely perfect! There’s no agenda here other than identifying things that will make you a more effective and productive programmer.
That leads to a book packed with solid advice, whether it’s about how to write code or how to think about your career. The authors are consultants, so there are plenty of clear and interesting examples drawn from many different problem domains. That’s super fun for someone like me who’s hyper-focused on a single kind of programming.
"One of the most significant books in my life." -Obie Fernandez, Author, The Rails Way
"Twenty years ago, the first edition of The Pragmatic Programmer completely changed the trajectory of my career. This new edition could do the same for yours." -Mike Cohn, Author of Succeeding with Agile , Agile Estimating and Planning , and User Stories Applied
". . . filled with practical advice, both technical and professional, that will serve you and your projects well for years to come." -Andrea Goulet, CEO, Corgibytes, Founder, LegacyCode.Rocks
". . . lightning does strike twice, and this book is proof." -VM…
It feels a little weird to recommend a book written forty-something years ago about the development of a computer you’ve never heard of… but this book does a better job than any book I’ve ever read of capturing how it feels to be part of an engineering team completely committed to doing something great.
It’s hard for muggles to understand why engineers get so passionate about their projects, but this book gets it. I felt seen.
Tracy Kidder's "riveting" story of one company's efforts to bring a new microcomputer to market won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and has become essential reading for understanding the history of the American tech industry.
Computers have changed since 1981 when The Soul of a New Machine first examined the culture of the computer revolution. What has not changed is the feverish pace of the high-tech industry, the go-for-broke approach to business that has caused so many computer companies to win big (or go belly up), and the cult of pursuing mind-bending technological innovations.
A thoroughly fascinating (and fascinatingly thorough) look at engineering practices at Google.
It’s an encyclopedia written by a bunch of authors, so some of the chapters are a little dry, but for those of us who aren’t on teams with 25,000 engineers it’s spell-binding to see what programming at that sort of scale looks like. Some of the chapters prompted us to think really hard about the way we do things at Sucker Punch.
Today, software engineers need to know not only how to program effectively but also how to develop proper engineering practices to make their codebase sustainable and healthy. This book emphasizes this difference between programming and software engineering.
How can software engineers manage a living codebase that evolves and responds to changing requirements and demands over the length of its life? Based on their experience at Google, software engineers Titus Winters and Hyrum Wright, along with technical writer Tom Manshreck, present a candid and insightful look at how some of the world's leading practitioners construct and maintain software. This book covers…
Yes, it’s a textbook, albeit a particularly well-written one. You may already have it on your shelf, if you’ve taken a programming class or two.
I’m way too old to have used CLRS as a textbook, though! For me, it’s an effectively bottomless collection of neat little ideas—an easy-to-describe problem, then a series of increasingly clever ways to solve that problem. How often do I end up using one of those algorithms? Not very often! But every time I read the description of an algorithm, I get a nugget of pure joy from the “aha” moment when I first understand how it works.
I’ve read a lot of books about programming; very few of them have made me laugh. None made me laugh as much as this book.
There’s one chapter where… nah, I don’t want to spoil it for you. Plus it has cartoons! Obviously, none of that would matter unless it also had interesting things to say about the practice of programming, but it’s packed full of interesting perspectives on all sorts of issues, from team dynamics to thinking about your career to an explicit consideration of the ethics of programming.
When we make games at Sucker Punch, we aim to “surprise and delight” the player—and that’s exactly what this book did for me.
If you're passionate about programming and want to get better at it, you've come to the right source. Code Craft author Pete Goodliffe presents a collection of useful techniques and approaches to the art and craft of programming that will help boost your career and your well-being. Goodliffe presents sound advice that he's learned in 15 years of professional programming. The book's standalone chapters span the range of a software developer's life - dealing with code, learning the trade, and improving performance - with no language or industry bias. Whether you're a seasoned developer, a neophyte professional, or a hobbyist,…
We’ve got a problem. When freshly-minted programmers join our team at Sucker Punch they need to be turned into effective professional coders as quickly as possible so that we can get on with making games like Ghost of Tsushima. To accelerate this process we’ve distilled our combined programming wisdom into a set of easy-to-remember and easy-to-apply rules that we teach our newbies, which we imaginatively call “The Rules.”
The Rules of Programming uses plenty of examples to explore these rules—really more like guidelines than rules, guardrails to let new programmers know they’re heading towards trouble. It’s a fun and thought-provoking read whether you’re a new-ish programmer or just someone looking for a new perspective on coding.
I am a Harvard- and MIT-trained physician-scientist, and I am drawn to research problems that bridge the basic and the practical – how a better understanding of cells and tissues can inform new therapies for cancer and other diseases. As children, we are all scientists – mini-hypothesis generators trying to make sense of the world. I suppose I never outgrew that curiosity. My list of best science books credits writers who bring to life the excitement that comes from looking at the natural world in a new way, a spirit that I try to emulate in my own writing. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have!
Everybody knows that all animals—bats, bears, sharks, ponies, and people—start out as a single cell: the fertilized egg. But how does something no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence give rise to the remarkable complexity of each of these creatures?
FROM ONE CELL is a dive inside the cell and its evolutionary prerogatives to explain how these "endless forms most beautiful," as Charles Darwin called them, come about. Along the way, we learn about the scientific process, filled as it is with serendipity, as the story is told through the eyes of the scientists who informed…
From One Cell: A Journey into Life's Origins and the Future of Medicine
Every animal on Earth begins life as a single cell. From this humble origin, the nascent creature embarks on a risky journey fraught with opportunities for disaster-yet with astounding regularity, it reaches its destination intact. From One Cell illuminates this epic transformation-still one of nature's most mysterious feats-to show where we all come from and where we're going.
Through the eyes of the scientists unraveling the secrets of development, we see how all the information needed to build a human fits into a fertilised egg, and how the trillions of cells that emerge know what to become and where to…
