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programming and human factors
by Jeff Atwood
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Steve McConnell's Code Complete 2 is the Joy of Cooking for software developers. Reading it means that you enjoy your work, you're serious about what you do, and you want to keep improving. In Code Complete, steve notes that the average programmer reads less than one technical book per year. The very act of reading this book already sets you apart from probably ninety percent of your fellow developers. In a good way. I like this book so much that the title of this website is derived from it-- the examples of what not to do are tagged with the "coding horror" icon. And there's nothing funnier than a coding horror-- until you have to deal with one yourself. Then it's suddenly not so funny any more. Do yourself a favor. Make this the first book you read, and the first book you recommend to your fellow developers. Updated 6/27/04: Version 2.0 released! |
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The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition) Arguably the only classic book in our field. If you haven't read it, shame on you.
I challenge any developer to pick up a copy of The Mythical Man Month and
not find this tale of a long-defunct OS,
and the long-defunct team that developed it, startlingly relevant. This twenty-five
year old book boldly illustrates one point: computers may change,
but people don't. |
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Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability The single best book on usability I've ever read. The title says "web usability" but don't be fooled by its faux specificity. Steve Krug covers every important usability concept in this book, and covers it well. It's almost fun. If you choose to read only one book on usability, choose this one. It's chock full of great information, and it's presented in a concise, approachable format. It's suitable for any audience: technical, non-technical, user, developer, manager, you name it. 
Er.. yeah. Never been in a meeting like that. The solution to this problem, by the way, is usability testing. Imagine that: making decisions based on actual data instead of never ending, last man standing filibuster style religious debates. Revolutionary! |
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The full title of this book is Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Development Schedules, which isn't just long-winded and vaguely ridiculous, it's also an unfortunate misnomer. Rapid Development isn't about rapid development. It's about the reality of failure . The vast majority of software development projects will fail: they will overrun their schedules, produce substandard results, or sometimes not even finish at all. This isn't an argument; it's a statistical fact. The unpleasant truth is that your team has to be very good to simply avoid failing, much less to succeed. While that may sound depressing-- okay, it is depressing-- you'll still want to read this book. Why? Because half* of success is not repeating the same mistakes you, or other people, have made. The epiphany offered in this book is that making mistakes is good-- so long as they are all new, all singing, all dancing mistakes. If you're making the same old classic mistakes, you've failed before you've even begun. And you probably have no idea how likely it is that you're making one of these mistakes right now. Our field is one of the few where change is the only constant, so it's only natural to embrace that change and try different "Rapid" development techniques. But the converse isn't true. We can't assume that so much has changed since 1970 that all the old software development lessons are obsolete and irrelevant when compared to our hot new technology. It's the same old story: computers have changed; people haven't. At least have some idea of what works and what doesn't before you start-- in McConnell's words, "read the instructions on the paint can before painting." Sure, it sounds obvious enough until you read this book and realize how rarely that actually happens in our field. * According to the book, technically, one-quarter. But I think it's more than that. |
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Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd Ed. If you've ever seen the performance of an all-star sports team suffer due to poor coaching, you'll appreciate this book. It doesn't matter how many "coding superstars" you've got when none of them can talk to each other, or agree on anything. And it no developer, however talented, can work effectively when constantly being barraged with minor interruptions. Developers aren't known for their people skills, per se, but here's the ironic part: the success of your project may hinge on just that. If you have any legitimate aspirations to be a "Team Leader" in practice instead of in name only, you need to pick up a copy of this book. While this book is full of great, totally valid points, it also implies a level of employee control over the workplace that is pure fantasy at most companies. But at least you'll know when your work environment, or your team, are the real problem-- and more importantly, what to do about it. |
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It can be incredibly frustrating to develop software, because so much can go wrong. A lot of what we do is defensive: trying to anticipate what will go wrong before it does. It's mentally fatiguing, and can eventually manifest itself in some negative ways. I sometimes describe this to non-technical people as building a watch with a thousand moving parts, all of which can fail randomly at the slightest provocation. Good times! Designing software is difficult, to be sure, but designing a door is difficult too. The nuances of design extend into every object you touch, whether it's some hot new SQL engine, or a humble shoe. This book will give you a new appreciation of the "devil in the details." If designing a door isn't the no-brainer we thought it was, maybe it's time to give ourselves a break for not being able to design software perfectly, either. |
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About Face 3.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design Alan Cooper, father of Visual Basic, godfather of usability. I'll be honest: it's been years since I read this book. I bought it when it was released circa 1995, so I have the "old" 1.0 version of the book. (Is it considered bad usability when you obsolete your own books with new revisions?) This book, along with GUI Bloopers, tends to be a rather pedagogic rulebook on presenting a consistent GUI. But this one is full of more generally applicable guidelines. Of the GUI problems used for illustration-- with examples from the hoary old Windows 95 UI-- it's interesting to compare which have been mostly resolved (using visual examples to show the effects of dialog selections before you make them), and which have not (stopping the proceedings with modal idiocy). Unlike GUI Bloopers, this is all pre-web, so there's no discussion of the web idiom and how it is impacting GUI design. But it's still a fantastically useful book; I used the chapter on what error messages should look as a model for a recent .NET project. |
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This is the book that introduced the world to the concept of personas: rather than thinking of users as an abstract, difficult-to-describe, amorphous group of people, personas instruct us to talk about specific users who have names, personalities, needs, and goals. Would our users want a print preview feature? Who knows? But if Gerry Manheim, Account Executive, has to print out his weekly expense report as a part of his job, you better believe print preview needs to be in there. There's nothing magical here; as always, it boils down to knowing who your users are and what they really do-- and the personas technique is a great way to get there. There's also an interesting analysis here of how developers tend to think themselves qualified to make usability decisions on behalf of "regular" users, when in reality they're anything but. Developers are freakish, extreme users at best-- "Homo Logicus" versus "Homo Sapiens." Unless you happen to be writing a compiler where developers are the end users. One hidden lesson in this book is that sometimes it doesn't matter how good your design is: the scanner software and the web development software which Alan consulted on, and uses as examples in this book, both failed in the marketplace for reasons that had nothing to do with their usability-- which was verifiably excellent.* Sometimes great products fail for reasons beyond your control, no matter how hard you try. Feel free to use this fact to counterbalance the sometimes smug tone of the book. Anyway, another great book by Cooper, and a logical progression from About Face. In About Face, Cooper covered "Perpetual Intermediates" as the target audience; here, that's refined into the more specific, and thus easier to develop against, personas. * I owned the exact model of "behind the keyboard" USB scanner pictured in the book, and I was quite impressed with the bundled scanning software. I eventually gave this scanner to my Dad. One time I was chatting on the phone with him and without any prompting at all, he mentioned to me how much he liked the scanning software. This was before the book had been published! |
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GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Do's for Software Developers and Web Designers Back in the good old days of Windows 95 and Apple's System 7, there were real GUI rules. And this is a hard-core GUI design book, about the ellipsis in menus, and the alignment of buttons and text on dialogs. It's debatable how much users actually understood these rules, but at least you could expect the user interface of Application A to behave very similarly to Application B. It's good to get a refresher course in "classic" GUI design principles, if only to compare with the current wild and wooly state of affairs on the web, where every day a budding Flash designer decides to create his own GUI. From scratch. With a custom soundtrack. The reality is that the classic GUI world and the browser world are merging-- taking all the best qualities of both. There are whole classes of applications that have very browser-like interfaces. This is known as the Inductive User Interface, and the first time I recall seeing it is in Microsoft Money circa 2000 or so. You can expect to see lots of convergence in Windows Vista. |
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Programming Pearls (2nd Edition) I hesitated to include Programming Pearls because it covers some fairly low-level coding techniques, but there are enough "pearls" of software craftsmanship embedded in this book to make it well worth any developer's time. Any book containing this graph.. 
.. is worth its weight in gold. TRS-80 versus DEC Alpha to illustrate 48n versus n3 algorithms? Come on folks, it just doesn't get any better than that. Programming Pearls is the next best thing to working side by side with a master programmer for a year or so. It is the collective wisdom of many journeyman coders distilled into succinct, digestible columns. I won't lie to you: there are entire chapters that can probably be ignored. For example, I can't imagine implementing sorting, heap, or hash algorithms as documented in columns 11, 13, and 14 respectively, given today's mature libraries of such basic primitives. But for every textbook-tedious exercise, there is real, practical advice alongside. Just scan through the book, ignoring the code sections, and I doubt you'll be disappointed. Column 8, "Back of the Envelope" is essential, probably the best treatment of estimation I've seen anywhere. It also goes a long way towards explaining those crazy interview questions that companies love to annoy us with. You can read sample sections of the book online if you're still on the fence. I recently used the chapter on strings to illustrate the use of Markov chains in generating synthetic data to fill an empty database with-- a performance estimation technique covered in "Back of the Envelope". |
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The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master This book reminds me a lot of Programming Pearls, but it's actually better, because it's less focused on code. Instead of worrying about code, the authors boiled down all the practical approaches that they've found to work in the real world into this one book. Not all of these things are technically programming. For example, asking yourself "why am I doing this? Is this even worth doing at all?" isn't thinking outside the box; it's something you should incorporate into your daily routine to keep yourself-- and your co-workers-- sane. And that's what makes Pragmatic Programmer such a great book. If you'd like to know a little more about the book, I created a HTML version of the pullout reference card included inside, which provides a nice overview of the contents. |
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Designing Web Usability : The Practice of Simplicity Jakob Neilsen is well known for his usability site, and his career as a usability expert extends back to 1989 when his first book was published. Designing Web Usability is of course a full-on web usability primer, so it's a bit different than the GUI-oriented Cooper books. |
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Information is beautiful. And so is a well-designed GUI. You don't need to own all three books in the series unless you're a completist (or a masochist, I suppose), but the first two are essential. Chris Sells has some interesting insight on the Tufte books based on a Tufte seminar he attended in June 2004. |
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Mastering Regular Expressions, Second Edition UNIX has a well-deserved reputation for being complex and impenetrable. So do Regular Expressions. I may be a card carrying member of the "Keep It Simple Stupid" club, but I'm making a meteor sized exception for regular expressions. Written properly, they will save you a tremendous amount of time in string manipulation, and I've never run across a project where they didn't come in handy somewhere. See for yourself. Once you delve into the world of regular expressions, you may become drunk with the amazing power and potential they have, which results in things like Perl. Remember, absolute power corrupts absolutely. But it also rocks absolutely. |
Posted by Jeff Atwood View blog reactions
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I think you have missed The Dynamics of Software Development.
Serge on August 25, 2004 10:52 AMGood book selection Jeff,
I'd probably add Waltzing with Bears by Demarco and Lister to the list - a great book for understanding (or at least accepting) risk management on software projects.
Is Code Complete 2nd Ed worth getting if you've already read the 1st Ed? It's one of those must have books, but, I have it ;) that and the fact that it's too big to read on my commute...
Len Holgate on September 17, 2004 03:40 PMI think it's worth getting the second edition, but realize that I am a total McConnell fanboy. I already owned two copies of the 1st edition, one for home, one for work. There are a lot of updates, though the body of the content hasn't changed dramatically. The main one I noticed is that he re-worked all the examples in modern language. Some of the other changes are listed on Steve's site:
I will definitely look into The Dynamics of Software Development
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1556158238
and Walting with Bears
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0932633609
The other DeMarco book was excellent but a bit depressing; at most companies the employees have little to no control over the factors described in Peopleware. And even the managers can't buck company policy to the extent implied in the book. Kind of sad, but it makes me want to start my own company. If only I wasn't so lazy..
Jeff Atwood on September 19, 2004 10:25 PMI didn't like the Inmates book. I got the distinct impression that what Alan found to be hard to use defined his definition of what the world found hard to use. And he makes the extremely bold claim that ALL the interaction design for the ENTIRE product should be done before any coding is done. What? Are we going back to the waterfall, except calling it interaction design instead of requirements this time? Maybe as the first introduction to developing around personas is this book good, but the rest was, in my opinion, a waste of time.
Darrell on September 21, 2004 09:24 AMYeah, Cooper is kind of overbearing-- you have to disregard about half of what he says. The reason I keep reading him is because the other half is usually great.
Jeff Atwood on September 21, 2004 09:20 PMYou may want to read: The Essence of Human-Computer Interaction by Christine Faulkner. This book is an excellent workbook in HCI.
Geoff Dalgas on February 8, 2005 03:23 PMI think you should add Scott Berkuns' 'The Art of Project Management' to the list. It's light, thoughtful and fun to read.
sameer borate on August 21, 2005 12:56 AMI notice there are no books specifically on Refactoring, or TDD. Do you have any favorites? Do you believe those topics are worthy of being on a recommended reading list?
Steve Steiner on September 8, 2005 01:56 AMIt's really a question of focus. I'm more interested in UI and usability.
In other words, it doesn't matter how pretty or bug-free your code is on the inside when nobody can figure out how to use the outside.
I do have a few high level coding books in here, but I explicitly avoid recommending anything too specific or overly technical. Most developers are pretty good at the technical coding stuff anyway; what they need is to exercise some different muscles.
Jeff Atwood on September 8, 2005 01:34 PMYour clear focus and passion about your topics is definitely the reason I keep coming back to your blog.
I was interested in those two topics because of the book I'm just finishing, Michael Feathers "Working Effectively with Legacy Code". It is a nuts & bolts look at injecting TDD into development when you can't start from scratch. It's defintely worth a look.
Steve Steiner on September 9, 2005 12:42 AMyou should look at:
Refactoring: improving the design of existing code
by Martin Fowler
a good book!
mp
ps: i'm also a steve McConnell fan. code complete 2nd edition had added a refactoring section also.
Mike Pijl on September 15, 2005 01:03 PMDon't forget the rest of the pragmatic series, pragmatic unit testing and ruby are both superb!
deepak trama on October 28, 2005 09:30 AMNot the pragmatic ruby! It's terrible until it settles down into a ruby manual. The introductory chapters are really confusing and badly put together.
Inmates ia also a terrible book. The guy doesn't have a clue.
xman on March 5, 2006 04:26 PMI haven't read the Krug book - since we seem to agree on so many others, it's going on the list. About Face 1.0 was simply glorious, 2.0 is too much of a sales pitch for my taste. Code Complete 1.0 dated very badly - fortunately McConnell realised it! And it's very good, even if he does claim (without any clear justification IMO) to have sorta kinda invented Agile and TDD... Nielsen makes a kind of sense, but he's a bit too back-to-basics for me.
Good list.
Mike Woodhouse on March 22, 2006 09:26 AMI'm also a McConnel fanboy, I've even got my first 3 books by him autographed. (How you know you've gone from fan, over the line to fanboy)
"Agile and Iterative Development: a Managers Guide" By Craig Larman is a great book on Agile development another great primer for Agile is Larman's "How to fail with RUP"
http://www.agilealliance.org/articles/larmancraigkruchtenph/file
Anyway, this book reminds me of Code Complete in it's light style and in-your-face reality checks, with wonderful sections like "How to tell if your XP expert isn't"
Malcolm Anderson on March 22, 2006 12:17 PMGreat list, thanks!
If you're working in an OO language like Java, the list should probably include Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, although this book actually predates Java.
And definitely that Fowler book, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code. In addition to recommendations for approaching refactoring, Fowler provides a list of "code smells" :) to look out for, which is a handy shorthand for bad ideas to avoid.
cdj on March 22, 2006 01:04 PMHi Jeff/all,
Thanks for your valuable comments.
For anyone interested in object-oriented techonology and software development in general I'd recommend Object-Oriented Software Construction (OOSC) by Bertrand Meyer, a must read imho.
Regards
ecab on March 28, 2006 11:32 AMHow about the classic, "Design Patterns" by the GOF?
Matt on March 29, 2006 05:33 AMI also like Jakob Nielsen's book on Home Page Design where he shows 50 sites, and how they are wrong/right for information architechture and usability.
Btw I have my own saying.
For an application to truly beautiful, it has to be beautiful in teh code and the design ui. If only 1 is beautiful, then it is truly bad.
:)
Craig M. Rosenblum on March 30, 2006 09:29 AM
Could someone please define the acronym 'TDD'?
(Does it mean 'test-driven design'? I found that
as one of many possibilities with 'define: tdd' into
Google?)
And, more importantly, could you please explain
which of those textbooks explains 'TDD' in
some detail?
[Hmmm...maybe it is part of the 'refactoring'
camp? I have read just a bit on that subject.]
TIA...
Dave
Dave on May 28, 2006 01:38 PMI'd recommend Knuth, 'The Art of Computer Programming' and Abelson and Sussman, 'The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs'.
pwyll on June 17, 2006 10:20 AMDave:
Yes, TDD stands for test-driven development. As I understand it, it's about developing tests which test the requirements, and coding to pass these tests. Your favorite search engine can tell you more.
Other thoughts on the books listed above:
Don't Make Me Think is a great book focusing on web development (some of the topics will translate well to UI design). There's a 2nd edition out now with a few new chapters, nothing worth the money if you have the first edition.
Mythical Man-Month is great.
I haven't read through too much of GUI Bloopers, but if you are having problems with something (error text, or the right use for radio buttons) you can find a section which will prove helpful.
The Design of Everyday Things is good but I found it a bit dry.
Chris Vance on June 26, 2006 08:26 PMAnother one from Steve McConnell
"Software estimation Demystifying the black art"
Once of its kind
Have you read joel spolsky's book on guis
I forget the name
you can find it on www.joelonsoftware.com
I found it good because it was short, simple and had lots of pictures. Also he has a humorous writing style which caught my attention so I actually remembered some of the rules.
But its not for dummies, which i make it sound like, its a serious book
Tim is referring to "User Interface Design for Programmers" by Joel Spolsky.
I read this a year ago. I recall it contained some interesting, useful information, but nothing I had not read in Don't Make Me Think or elsewhere.
Chris Vance on August 4, 2006 06:19 PMA classic in this vein is the book "Professional Pascal: Essays in the Practice of Programming" by Henry Ledgard.
I read this book back in the day based on the recommendation of my advisor, and it changed the way I thought about software development.
Granted, it's about Pascal, but the general concepts inside it's pages apply to every higher language.
John Gordos on August 15, 2006 09:08 AMI am *shocked* that you don't mention the single most important book that has come out in the past 11 years: Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Vlissides, Helm, Gamma, and Johnson. Not one of the books you mention has had a cross-developer, cross-language impact that this one has.
Anyone doing OO development had better read this book, lest you try to reinvent the same wheel many folks before you have already honed into a well-oiled machine.
And yes, it uses C++/Smalltalk for examples...there are C#, Java, etc versions that exist now, so not a big deal if you don't know those languages...
Dave Rodenbaugh on August 29, 2006 09:56 AMI'd add "Code Reading" by Diomidis Spinellis: http://www.amazon.com/Code-Reading-Open-Source-Perspective/dp/0201799405/sr=8-1/qid=1159794940/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-7925035-7508914?ie=UTF8&s=books
Bill Mill on October 2, 2006 06:16 AMWhich is a good starter book for leranign about Agile software development
Supriya on October 5, 2006 09:05 AMCode Complete Second Edition is by far the BEST book every written for our field. It ranks number one of my list. The book that ranks number two most people probably wouldn't want because it is not only language specific, but platform specific. It is John Walkenbach's Power Programming With Excel 2003. If you ever wanted to learn to automate Excel or learn VBA in general it is the best book every written.
Does anyone have any suggestions for a good JavaScript book? There are so many out there and most of them are crap. I would love to find a list of good language-specific books. It is hard to find a good book.
Billkamm on March 29, 2007 09:01 PMNeilsen has written a new book "Prioritizing Web Usability". I just finished reading it and it discusses many topics in the light of today's changed Internet environment - more knowledgeable users, better Internet bandwidth.
So will you be recommending the new book instead?
Krishna Kumar on April 1, 2007 07:49 PMHi Krishna, I didn't even know it was out! Thanks for letting me know, I'll place an order for it right now.
Jeff Atwood on April 2, 2007 12:09 AMHi Jeff
One more interesting book is :
How to Solve it By Computer by R G Dromey.
(The idea of the book is based on another book How to Solve It - A New Aspect of Mathematical Method, by G Polya).
Being from a primarily C background, I think Kernighan and Pike's "The Practice of Programming" is good as well.
http://www.amazon.com/Practice-Programming-Brian-W-Kernighan/dp/020161586X
I had read Programming Pearls. In that book, Bentley recommends
"Conceptual Blockbusting - A Guide to Better Ideas".
Have you read this book ? How did you find it ?
http://www.amazon.com/Conceptual-Blockbusting-Guide-Better-Ideas/dp/0201550865
Jeff -
The 'See for Yourself' link under 'Mastering Regular Expressions, Second Edition' is broken.
Regards.
Greg on April 24, 2007 05:50 AMI second Michael Feathers' Working Effectively with Legacy Code -- http://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Robert-Martin/dp/0131177052/. I've read about a bajillion software books, and WELC is probably the most useful technical (as in "shows code examples") book I've read. I wish I'd read it ten years ago (and every 2-3 years since...).
David on April 24, 2007 12:23 PMHi Jeff, I just saw that About Face 3 is to be released.
Nick Berardi on April 26, 2007 11:03 AMThank you for inspiring me to order "Code complete 2"!
Patrik on April 30, 2007 02:03 AMCode complete is a great book, we had a copy in office and usualy tell many people to refer to page 25-26 where Steve says, the people who spends less time in fronot of computer are more productive...
I ahve read also After the Gold Rush, in which he stress about the responsibility of Software developer (Each should get a licence...).
An Expert should know 50000 info intersts me great.
For OOAD , i would say Grady Booch Book is the bible.
mahadevan on May 1, 2007 09:14 PMCode complete is a great book, we had a copy in office and usually tell many people to refer to page 25-26 where Steve says, and the people who spend less time in front of computer are more productive...
I have read also After the Gold Rush, in which he stress about the responsibility of Software developer (Each should get a license...).
An Expert should know 50000 info interests me great.
For OOAD , I would say Grady Booch Book is the bible.
How about "Writing Solid Code" by Steve Maguire? It is full of useful mental habits.
N. Velope on May 11, 2007 04:37 PMA quote about reading:
"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." by Mark Twain
Hi Jeff!
Im absolutely amazed that entirely by coincidence this collection is almost identical to mine! Spooky.
One point worth noting is that you cant really read Peopleware unless you're also willing to read Constantine on Peopleware to balance out the experience.
Also, have you ever considered condensing your blog entries into a Joel On Software Style Book? kind of like his "Best Software Writing" series? I'd be on your list of pre-orders.
/2ob
My last few months of reading came from Joel's blog and mainly management books. Now that I have read way to many management books in a row it's time to get back to usability. Time to place a large order on amazon thank you.
Shane Starcher on July 2, 2007 07:54 AMI've read Code Complete, Rapid development, and now I am reading About face. Does anyone recommend a good book for software design patterns (ie mvc, singleton, etc.)?
Cody Nichols on July 19, 2007 05:19 PMJeff Johnson has also written a "Web Bloopers" book. I found it pretty interesting.
Krishna Kumar on August 7, 2007 01:35 PMCody, the "Head First Design Patterns" is a good book.
Krishna Kumar on August 13, 2007 11:38 AMHi Jeff,
Nice list of books! Would you pretty please note that PERL is not an acronym, and never written that way? The language is "Perl", the comnpiler is "perl".
Ta muchly,
Jess
You forgot to mention: read literature, or poetry, or essays.
Whatever improves your fantasy and makes you think out of the pack, may help you; particularily if you have just come out of a course where they taught to you how to be a competent parrot and answer yessir to the professor!
Warning: staying out of the pack is not good if you want to get employed.
Alberto on August 23, 2007 07:05 AMJeff - this list is almost four years old. Could we get an updated list, please?
Bruce on August 29, 2007 07:11 AMBruce, the types of books I recommend aren't obsolete in 4 years. Or even 10! That's the whole point, as I see it.
(That said, I do try to update to reflect new revisions of the SAME books)
Jeff Atwood on August 29, 2007 09:27 AMI was looking around your site for other blogs you read/follow, but didn't see one. I really enjoy reading your blog, and I'm looking for other like-minded blogs out there.
"In Code Complete, steve notes that the average[...]"
Capitalize?
I was wondering what do you think about PMBOK Guide?.
Also, I just ordered "The Mythical Man-Month". I'll be getting it (i hope) next week :D
Fausto on October 15, 2007 11:33 PMI cant agree more about these excellent books =)
The last book that I read and that resist technologies changes is
Ship it! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects
Is from pragmatic press and with simple and useful ideas shows how to survive to *all* the things related to the development of a software project
Best Regards
Marcos
[quote=Jeff]Bruce, the types of books I recommend aren't obsolete in 4 years. Or even 10! That's the whole point, as I see it.
(That said, I do try to update to reflect new revisions of the SAME books)[/quote]
It's nice that you keep the page updated, but the fact is it says "February 02, 2004" in big letters at the top. Not an interesting list of reading. Could you at least strip out the date header and work to make this page look more dynamic? As a sidebar link from codinghorror.com I'd think you'd want some freshness or at least the appearance thereof.
Daniel Pritchett on November 16, 2007 01:45 PMI recommend two books: "Debugging - The Nine Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems" by David J. Agans, and "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering" by Robert L. Glass.
mac on November 28, 2007 02:10 AMSupprised my favorite "leadership" book isn't on there "Becoming a Technical Leader: An Organic Problem-Solving Approach" - http://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Technical-Leader-Problem-Solving-Approach/dp/0932633021/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196606785&sr=8-1
Jeff,
Your link "See for yourself" in the Mastering Regular Expressions is broken. Can you provide some other example?
Controversial one, this...
If every developer read Fabian Pascal's "Practical Issues in Database Management" there would be a heckuva lot less naff database designs to fix in the world...
http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Issues-Database-Management-Practitioner/dp/0201485559/
Mattster on December 4, 2007 02:00 AMThe article linked from the text next to Mastering Regular Expressions has disappeared.
Also, you seem to have written Perl as "PERL".
Josh on December 18, 2007 11:29 PMI'm also curious why the author hasn't mentioned Design Patterns. It seems to be on the shelf of every company I've ever worked for.
Cools, tnx, interesting to read
inc on January 21, 2008 10:50 AMWith regard to Programming Perls, there is a good article about graphical output (it may be inthe first book). The book discusses a graph made in the 1700's or early 1800's regarding Napolean's march and retreat to and from Russia. The article discusses how to make graphical representation tell the whole story as quickly as possible.
Also there ae some articles about defining problems and applying common sense soutions to *well defined* problems. Too often we (as programmers) do not get a full spec and our too generic soltions require both us and the system to do way too much work.
Lastly there is a chapter in Programming Perls (1) which is just small sayings (most which would fit on a bumpersticker). That chapter is a quick read, but will stay with the reader for a long time.
"If the code and the comment don't agree, then both aer wrong"
Many thanks for the "Code Complete 2" tip. Just arrived from Amazon here in Rio, and it's the best I've read until today about software contruction. Simple, direct and resourceful.
José Machado on January 28, 2008 07:41 AMThanks for the rec list. I just saw it now. Maybe you should plug it on your site more often?
Any tips on getting companies to buy these books for their programmers? You'd think they would, since it's in their best interest and all.
Cyde Weys on February 15, 2008 03:14 PMI really suggest "Dreaming in Code". Amazing read.
Jack on March 11, 2008 02:44 PMPerhaps I am showing my age, but I would suggest three books that are currently (unfortunately) out-of-print: P. J. Plauger's "Programming on Purpose" books.
http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Purpose-Essays-Design/dp/0137213743
http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Purpose-II-Essays-Software/dp/0133281051
http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Purpose-III-Software-Technology/dp/0133281132
All three are books that I enjoy rereading periodically. Granted, some of the articles are a bit dated, such as the discussion of online e-check companies, or DOS memory management, but most of the articles have more than stood the test of time, in my not at all humble opinion. :-)
Timothy Knox on March 25, 2008 11:02 PMThere's version 2.0 for GUI Bloopers.
http://www.amazon.com/GUI-Bloopers-2-0-Interactive-Technologies/dp/0123706432/
Excellent, easy to read. Can't compare it with the first book though, since I don't have it.
genial !!, no tienes libros en españo, quien pueda tener libros en español de esta calaña.
Saludos desde Chile
ctraos on April 29, 2008 07:23 AMThese are rather simple non-technical books. A developer should also read a lot of techinical in depth books.
I for example recommand a book on software patterns, for example the book from Gamma:
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
Tjerk on April 29, 2008 08:09 AMTufte has a fourth book now, _Beautiful Evidence_.
If you attend one of his seminars, you get all four (instant completist/masochist!) though it looks like the seminar has not changed much in at least four years.
Dave on April 30, 2008 12:44 PM| Content (c) 2008 Jeff Atwood. Logo image used with permission of the author. (c) 1993 Steven C. McConnell. All Rights Reserved. |
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