80 books like Managing Humans

In my consulting gigs, I come across plenty of clueless remarks. Here's a classic one: “We're falling behind schedule, so let's hire more coders.” Or a more recent gem: “We'll be ten times more productive if we generate code with AI.”

When I encounter such nonsense, I don't facepalm or cringe. Instead, I put on my poker face and drop a quote from The Mythical Man-Month.

In an industry where last year’s book is already outdated, Fred Brooks' collection of essays has been a guiding light for nearly half a century. His aphorisms have become legendary. “The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.” “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” “There is no silver bullet.” The list goes on and on.

John Carmack, one of the greatest programmers of our times, used to revisit this book every year or… show more.

A very personal recommendation, as it is about Vim, a very particular text editor that can be difficult to learn at first, but this is the best technical book that I’ve ever read. I use Vim as my main editor and this book makes an astonishing job in clearly explaining why it works the way it works. This book gets you into the proper mindset to use Vim, making it click internally and from there on, to feel way more natural and powerful. Even if you don’t want to use Vim as your main editor, it’s ubiquitous and it’s available by default on a huge amount of computers, making being comfortable with its usage a really powerful tool in a lot of situations. 

While this is a Python-specific book, it’s a fantastic description of all the possibilities for testing with a powerful module like Pytest offers. Testing is one of the basic experiences for a programmer, as it should be included as a core part of the development process. Understanding all the different options available like mark groups of tests, parametric tests, building your own extensions, or test coverage, to name only a few details, expands the understanding of how to design better tests and run them more efficiently.

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.

This book is essential in that it follows a systematic and scientific approach to software development, advocating for clarity in expressing algorithms, providing a rigorous framework for designing and reasoning about programs, and, fundamentally, always focusing on formal methods and mathematical techniques to ensure correctness and efficiency in programming code.

Most importantly, the book doesn’t just show you how to prove programs correct, but also teaches how to arrive from a definition to an efficient and correct solution, so I would recommend this to every developer.

Okay, hear me out. Yes, this book was published in 2007. Yes, it’s ostensibly about ActionScript, the coding language in Flash, which no one uses anymore. But you won’t use this book to learn ActionScript or Flash: You’ll use it to learn how to make things move with code, in any language. You’ll skip over the ActionScript-specific parts in favor of the lucid explanations and helpful illustrations. Your visual brain will appreciate seeing how sines, cosines, and tangents are relevant—and necessary!—to make digital things move. (Your heart will wish your brain had paid better attention in trigonometry class years earlier, but hey, no regrets!) The chapters “Trigonometry for Animation” and “Velocity and Acceleration” alone are worth the purchase price.

Continuing down the engineering part of this mini-curriculum, we have a collection of interesting ideas, each written by a different author, all of them inspiring.

Some of the chapters in this book I have reread more times than I can count, because the ideas are so original and intriguing that my fingers start to tingle.

Attending Harvard College gave me the opportunity to collaborate with great programmers in creating the early ARPA-net. But the best course I took was on compiler theory and construction, using an early draft of the material in this book.

Of course I learned how to build a compiler, which I did as my first job after graduating. But more important, I learned that a well-built compiler is a small amount of language-independent code with two major parts.

First the input part that realizes the content of the lexical and grammatical metadata, like today’s LEX and YACC, to turn the program being compiled into a semantic model.

Second the code generator that reads the semantic model and, based on generative model metadata, turns the semantics of the program being compiled to whatever form you want, whether executable code, assembler language, byte code or whatever.

This approach, while indispensable for compilers and… show more.

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.

One of the most treasured and unusual books in my personal library. It’s an encyclopedia from another world, entirely written in a made-up language. Page after page of haunting and strange illustrations, organized into specific categories and concepts. Sitting with this book transports me back to the time before I could read, when words felt like incomprehensible symbols. Taking the time to puzzle over this book feels like such a valuable experience. It takes me right out of the familiar ways of taking in information and puts me in a state of mind that has to search and consider the juxtaposition of images and ideas in totally new ways. I can’t recommend this book enough.