Here are 79 books that Working in Public fans have personally recommended if you like
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I would like to consider myself an experienced and successful designer, researcher, and educator. I'm an Associate Professor in Communication Design and the Head of Education for the School of Design at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom, where I've taught and researched for the last twenty years so I'm super passionate about this subject and love explaining how design works. Before joining academia, I worked internationally as a designer and creative director for numerous prestigious design and media organizations, including Philips, Time-Warner, Windmill Lane Pictures, and WPP in the UK, Ireland, USA, and Southeast Asia. Working in these different businesses and locations gave me a broad perspective on the role and importance of design.
This essential book by Don Norman does not need any more plugging, but it would be impossible to leave it out.
The book forms a brilliant introduction to User Experience Design by explaining how the design of everyday objects relies on an intuitive understanding of how they work. Once we translate this thinking from the physical to the digital world, we are halfway there as UX/UI designers.
Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious,even liberating,book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization. The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The…
I’ve been a professional software engineer and maintaining open-source software for 16 years. My work on open source has been heavily informed by industry best practises and my work on proprietary software has been heavily informed by open source best practises. Without these books, I’d be a worse engineer on many dimensions. Some of them may feel antiquated but all are still full of relevant wisdom for every open-source (and proprietary) software engineer today.
This is the oldest book on my list and is the most underrated. It describes, with serious rigour and detail, how to run more effective software projects and teams.
Most of this advice has been ignored by most of the industry for most of the time but it’s a big part of the reason I’ve worked from home for 14 years and am as productive as I am today.
Demarco and Lister demonstrate that the major issues of software development are human, not technical. Their answers aren't easy--just incredibly successful. New second edition features eight all-new chapters. Softcover. Previous edition: c1987. DLC: Management.
I’ve been a professional software engineer and maintaining open-source software for 16 years. My work on open source has been heavily informed by industry best practises and my work on proprietary software has been heavily informed by open source best practises. Without these books, I’d be a worse engineer on many dimensions. Some of them may feel antiquated but all are still full of relevant wisdom for every open-source (and proprietary) software engineer today.
This is from an older generation of open source development, pre-GitHub, but much of the advice here is still incredibly relevant and astute today, helping provide advice on the interpersonal as well as technical sides to open source development.
Many of the underlying principles from this book are what form my grounding as an open-source maintainer for the last 15 years.
The corporate market is now embracing free, "open source" software like never before, as evidenced by the recent success of the technologies underlying LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). Each is the result of a publicly collaborative process among numerous developers who volunteer their time and energy to create better software. The truth is, however, that the overwhelming majority of free software projects fail. To help you beat the odds, O'Reilly has put together Producing Open Source Software, a guide that recommends tried and true steps to help free software developers work together toward a common goal. Not just for…
I’ve been a professional software engineer and maintaining open-source software for 16 years. My work on open source has been heavily informed by industry best practises and my work on proprietary software has been heavily informed by open source best practises. Without these books, I’d be a worse engineer on many dimensions. Some of them may feel antiquated but all are still full of relevant wisdom for every open-source (and proprietary) software engineer today.
Another book that predates GitHub but provides a lot of actionable advice today that’s been mostly ignored across much of our industry.
Hard problems like “why isn’t my software project reliable?” are tackled head-on and addressed here. It was an early nudge for me to automate as much as possible in software projects and not ignore difficult problems with project organisation in favour of “fun” technical tasks.
"Ship It!" is a collection of tips that show the tools and techniques a successful project team has to use, and how to use them well. You'll get quick, easy-to-follow advice on modern practices: which to use, and when they should be applied. This book avoids current fashion trends and marketing hype; instead, readers find page after page of solid advice, all tried and tested in the real world. Aimed at beginning to intermediate programmers, "Ship It!" will show you: which tools help, and which don't, how to keep a project moving, approaches to scheduling that work, how to build…
My first computer was an early IBM PC back when all my friends had Commodores they used for gaming. Not being able to share their games meant I had to do something else, so I read the Introduction to Basic book that came in the box. I’ve been coding, reading about coding, writing about coding, teaching about coding, and talking about coding ever since. The world of technology moves so fast that it is hard to keep up. If you’ve taken one of my courses or listened to The Real Python Podcast, I hope you’ve heard about my passion for the topic.
Most of the code I write and use is open source. As a programmer, it is easy to think “open source means free.” I didn’t think much about it until one of the companies I worked at got acquired, and we had to audit our licenses.
The big company that bought us was very particular about which licenses were compatible with their needs. That was when I realized I needed to understand this stuff better. Rosen does a great job of teaching what is otherwise legalese in plain-spoken, easy-to-understand language. This book taught me why I choose the licenses I do rather than picking blindly.
"I have studied Rosen's book in detail and am impressed with its scope and content. I strongly recommend it to anybody interested in the current controversies surrounding open source licensing." -John Terpstra, Samba.org; cofounder, Samba-Team"Linux and open source software have forever altered the computing landscape. The important conversations no longer revolve around the technology but rather the business and legal issues. Rosen's book is must reading for anyone using or providing open source solutions." -Stuart Open Source Development LabsA Complete Guide to the Law of Open Source for Developers, Managers, and Lawyers
Now that open source software is blossoming around…
I boast a two-decade-long career in the software industry. Over the years, I have diligently honed my programming skills across a multitude of languages, including JavaScript, C++, Java, Ruby, and Clojure. Throughout my career, I have taken on various management roles, from Team Leader to VP of Engineering. No matter the role, the thing I have enjoyed the most is to make complex topics easy to understand.
This book profoundly changed how I approach functional programming. I found its deep dive into core concepts like recursion, abstraction, and modularity incredibly insightful. The exercises pushed me to think critically and refine my problem-solving process.
Despite being an older book, its content remains relevant and valuable to me. I consider it the best pragmatic introduction to functional programming.
As others have gone into, this is a great programming book for many reasons, and is a must-read for anyone who is interested in software design. Rather than waste time reaffirming the excellent positive reviews of this book, I wanted to cover something that I have not seen in the reviews: namely that there are multiple publishers for this book (as it is an "open source" book). At the time of writing, there is this McGraw-Hill publication, and, for 40% less, an MIT press edition. While I have not seen the McGraw-Hill version in person to see what quality benefits…
I first learned to program in college in 1970. Since then I’ve spent much time as a software developer, manager, tester, process improvement leader, consultant, trainer, author, and, of course, a user. I quickly learned that I didn’t have time to make all the mistakes that every software developer before me had already made. My training and writing career has involved sharing what I and others have learned with audiences to help them quickly become more effective software development team members, regardless of their project role. This book distills insights and observations both from my own experience and from what I’ve heard from thousands of students and consulting clients.
Many of the most significant principles of effective software development are timeless. They’re independent of the development life cycle or model, programming language, application type, and so forth. Although this book is quite a few years old now, nearly all of its contents are still valid. The 201 principles cover the full spectrum of software engineering: general principles, requirements engineering, design, coding, testing, management, product assurance, and evolution. The descriptions of each principle are concise, whereas my 60 lessons in Software Development Pearls go into a great deal more detail and offer many practical techniques.
There’s an unfortunate tendency among young software people to disregard knowledge from the past as irrelevant to them. That’s not correct. This book can help close significant gaps in any practicing software developer’s knowledge.
This text defines governing principles for software development, assumptions that work regardless of tools used, to keep software projects from costing too much, taking too long and disappointing users.
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.
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…
During my career, I’ve worked on projects large and small (1 - 60+ people) in a wide variety of fields (like repair dispatch, ticket sales, and professional football coaching--the NFL kind not the FIFA kind). All of them, and particularly the big ones, were like antique clocks: they had lots of moving pieces and if any piece broke, the whole thing wouldn’t work. (Unfortunately, failed software projects don’t look nice on your mantelpiece.) In this list, I’ve tried to pick some books that you might not discover if you look only for programming books. Read those, too, but don’t ignore the more human-oriented dimensions of software development. Hopefully you’ll find these choices interesting and useful.
Software engineering involves several phases such as requirements gathering, design, programming, testing, and deployment.
This book explains techniques that allow you to build quality and robustness into every phase of the process. It discusses design, classes, defensive programming, collaboration, refactoring, and more.
The book uses many examples in an assortment of languages but the concepts apply to any programming language. In fact, the main themes like building error detection into every step of the process generalize to even non-programming parts of the development process.
If you’re an experienced developer, you may have discovered some of this book’s ideas elsewhere or even on your own, but you only need to pick up one or two new tidbits to make the book worthwhile.
Widely considered one of the best practical guides to programming, Steve McConnell's original CODE COMPLETE has been helping developers write better software for more than a decade. Now this classic book has been fully updated and revised with leading-edge practices-and hundreds of new code samples-illustrating the art and science of software construction. Capturing the body of knowledge available from research, academia, and everyday commercial practice, McConnell synthesizes the most effective techniques and must-know principles into clear, pragmatic guidance. No matter what your experience level, development environment, or project size, this book will inform and stimulate your thinking-and help you build…
If someone had told me during my early professional years that I would become a strong advocate for functional programming and the author of a fundamental book on functional software engineering, I would have found it hard to believe. Was functional programming truly worth dedicating my life to? However, once I experienced the sheer beauty of functional programming, there was no turning back. I delved deep into Haskell and functional C++, and began writing articles, giving talks, and developing various technologies. I realized that I possessed a truly unique perspective on approaching software engineering in functional languages, and that there was a significant knowledge gap that needed to be filled for the benefit of all.
My journey in the world of software development has been arduous and challenging.
One of the common struggles we all face is the overwhelming number of solutions available, making it impossible to fully grasp everything at a deep level.
Just when I thought I had mastered an approach and felt competent in it, a new shiny approach would emerge, demanding my immediate attention. It often felt like a never-ending race to keep up with the ever-evolving field.
This constant pursuit of staying relevant as a software engineer can be frustrating, as it feels like we are always lagging behind the rapidly advancing world. I discovered that knowledge of specific technologies, frameworks, or libraries does not easily transfer across different technology stacks. They are too specific and lack universality. It was then that I turned my focus to more general principles of software engineering.
I realized that there are fundamental engineering…
Incorporate effective domain modeling into the software development process
Software design thought leader and founder of Domain Language, Eric Evans, provides a systematic approach to domain-driven design, presenting an extensive set of design best practices, experience-based techniques, and fundamental principles that facilitate the development of software projects facing complex domains. Intertwining system design and development practice, this book incorporates numerous examples based on actual projects to illustrate the application of domain-driven design to real-world software modeling and development.
Domain Model: Part I outlines the goals of domain-driven development, defines terms, and gives an overview of the implications of using the…
