The most recommended books for programmers

Margaret and the Moon tells the story of Margaret Hamilton, who wrote the computer code that was key to the US first landing on the moon. The story is full of suspense. Margaret—not the astronauts—is the real hero of the story. But what is best about this book is that it is bursting with curiosity. Margaret wonders, Why are there only DADDY Longlegs? Why aren’t more girls scientists? How big is the moon? And with each of her questions, readers themselves became more and more curious! Isn’t that fabulous?!

I’ve always been a big fan of books that explode the “great man” myth and lift the curtains to show all of the unsung heroes behind history’s greatest accomplishments. The sociologist Howard Becker’s classic Art Worlds did this for creative professions, and Kathy Kleiman’s Proving Ground does the same thing for digital computers.

The birth of modern computing is usually credited to the mathematician Alan Turing. But the actual work of programming the world’s first general purpose digital computer, named ENIAC, was undertaken by six remarkable women mathematicians (Kathleen McNulty, Jean Jennings Bartik, Frances Elizabeth Snyder, Frances Bilas Spence, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer and Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum) whose names were left out of the history books.

Author Kathy Kleiman has made it her life’s work to restore these trailblazers to their rightful place at the beginning of the data revolution that has radically changed global society over the past 80 years.… show more.

I was quite late in picking up this book after it got published in 2014. Turned out that this mistake was all mine. Although the book is very opinionated, this masterpiece is filled with many nuggets of wisdom when it comes to writing highly maintainable unit tests. There are lots of code examples to be found as well. The ideal book to read after Test-Driven Development By Example and Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided By Tests.

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.

Even though this book is a bit older, I had a ton of fun doing the programming problems in this book. This book really makes you think outside the box as a programmer and try to solve various problems in different ways depending on what you are trying to optimize for.

I really learned a lot about not just solving a problem, but solving a problem for a specific set of goals. Overall it made me a better programmer and made me think more deeply about programming problems.

If you want to improve your problem-solving skills and have fun doing it, I would definitely recommend this book.

Another book with a detailed coverage of the Django web framework. This is a revised book written originally by Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss—the creators of Django themselves. Hence the initial chapters are an excellent in-depth description of how Django works. The remaining parts of the books go into intermediate and advanced topics.

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.

When people think about software engineering they mostly think about programming, but that’s not where a project starts. It starts with requirements.

(Really it sometimes starts with company politics, bickering, excuses, and backstabbing, but requirements gathering is often the official start.)

A good set of requirements keeps developers pulling in the same direction; a bad one can make the team inefficient, cause endless arguments, set developers against each other, and make the project feel like Lord of the Flies. I’ve seen projects scrapped and restarted from scratch or even canceled due to poor documentation.

Every software developer should know at least a little about writing so they can produce clear requirements and documentation.

This book isn’t specifically about writing documentation (which is something of an art in itself), but it can help you learn how to make your business writing more effective. This book won’t turn you into Shakespeare,… show more.

During the early years of my career as a software developer, I regularly developed very small programs that would exercise parts of the system that I was working on back then. I realized very quickly that those small programs would save me a lot of time figuring out whether the changes that I made would actually work or not. Until at some point a colleague mentioned the concept of Test-Driven Development. I first did some experimentation, dipping a toe into the water to feel the temperature. It wasn’t until the first time I picked up this book that I jumped right in. From then moment on, it all made sense. Although this book was published back in 2002, for me it still is the book when it comes to the subject of Test-Driven Development.      

This weighty tome delves deep into the low-level working of computer programs.

This book is a great resource for professional programmers who work close to the machine in such fields as embedded software, cybersecurity, and device drivers. Assuming a basic knowledge of the C language, Bryant and O’Hallaron, two CMU professors, teach how to read and understand compiled code, how to optimize it for better performance, and how to avoid common pitfalls.

This is a hard-core technical book, written by engineers for engineers, in a dense style that is nonetheless accessible and practical. I like the numerous applied problems, each accompanied by a worked-out solution.