Ask HN: Books for soon to be Software Engineers

I just graduated college with a degree in CS and took a job as a SE. I was curious to know if there were any books that would be valuble to help me bridge the gap between school and industry. Thanks for your suggestions.

Code Compete 2

Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art

Pro GIT

Debugging by Agans

If you will be programming in Java, these books will serve you incredibly well:

  * Effective Java
  * Java Concurrency in Practice
  * Head First Design Patterns

Rule number one is you can't learn EVERYTHING from a book. I'd suggest contributing to open source projects and reflecting on what you learned...

If you will be programming in Java, my condolences. (yes, I'm ready for the downvotes).

I'm sure there's some nice Java code out there. I recently agreed to do a Java project, and the 6 months I was at it sucked the joy of programming out of me.

I've spent the last few years doing Python, C and K, and in comparison, Java is so bureaucratic that I felt like 10% of my work was advancing towards my goal, and 90% was bureaucracy (compared to 20% bureaucracy in C, 5% in Python and 0.001% in K)

And as for books, I recommend Jon Bentley's "Programming Pearls" series, Steve McConnell's "Software Project Survival Guide" and DeMarco and Lister's "PeopleWare". The last two have more to do with project (and people) management than with software engineering - but you will need these skills much earlier than you'd expect, perhaps even in your first couple of months of work. And PeopleWare is a short and enjoyable read, you could put it in the "leisure" pile.