The best book about software engineering I found so far: https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book
Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?
111–120 of 127 posts
Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?
#112It's probably useful to un-read Clean Code, though I don't really have a recommendation for a good replacement. The replacement is something like "Make a lot of mistakes and develop good taste based on your experience." If you're interested in performance, you can read https://algorithmica.org/ and https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf
I keep seeing this online. Why? Clean Code was instrumental in my improvement as an engineer. Is there a reason why this is the opinion nowadays?
Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?
#113When I first graduated I read a bunch of tech focused books: they’re all helpful but I think practice and learning from more senior engineers is the most effective road to mastery! You can probably get away with not reading any of these books if you have good coworkers :).
That being said, these have been my favorites:
- designing data intensive applications (a great way of understanding systems + the basics of SRE)
- the senior engineer (I love the prototyping process he lays out)
- the effective engineer (lots of good gems for approaching prioritization)
- debugging (by David agans)- a great resource for a formalized debugging process if you don’t have one
- on writing well (I’m halfway through this, but it has been indispensable for writing tickets + messages at work)
Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Am not the OP, however, I have similar observations too. I noted that people who read fiction often handle various life's situations better. My hypothesis is that this would be because they get broader exposure to life's situations than what non-fiction books deliver in practice. I wish there were a lot more non-fiction books dealing with common and uncommon life's situations, which step out of the theory towards wha…
Could you give some more specific examples of such situations?
Love and relationships, rejection, failures, etc. When I was in middle to high school, I had no good understanding on how to handle these. Later too, have struggled with some situations. There have been situations that were nowhere talked about in any coursework and are somewhat rare that many people do not have experience with them. Movies sometimes talk about various situations, however, deal lesser with practical situations. I found that a few people around who understood these better and were known to be more mature had all been reading fiction books from middle school.
Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I keep seeing this online. Why? Clean Code was instrumental in my improvement as an engineer. Is there a reason why this is the opinion nowadays?
Because of clueless extremists. They don't try to understand the spirit of rules, but blindly apply rules to the letter
I haven't read it, but based on the examples from the book in "Goodbye Clean Code", the author is one of those extremists.
Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?
#116https://saasbook.info
(Which I haven't finished lol).
Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?
#117The Mythical Man-Month and The Design of Everyday Things are not out of date, even if older texts. The Pragmatic Programmer is also still worth a read and received an update since that list was created. EDIT: An old book (also received an update) I'd add is The Psychology of Computer Programming by Weinberg. More descriptive than prescriptive compared to many other books, written in and about the same period as The M…
Just want to add vote for Design of Everyday Things. If you are into creating anything that other people use (software, code, appliances, doors), you should read this book.
Just be warned. You're going to spend a couple of weeks after having read it being very frustrated with people influencing your world who apparently didn’t read it…
Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?
#118My favorite software books of the last few years:
"A Philosophy of Software Design" is mentioned a lot, +1
"The Missing README" is full of pragmatic advice to get from 'my code works' to 'my code is in production'. Many of the barriers to success have nothing to do with algorithms and everything to do with the organization running the project. It's marketed to new engineers, but I think anyone who writes software would get something out of it.
"Elements of Clojure" by Zach Tellman is a fantastic high-level architectural philosophy about how we build and compose abstractions. Only wish that the title wasn't tied to the Clojure programming language (most of the book is applicable to any language despite the title) and was a bit longer.
"Tidy First" is the first in a series by Kent Beck, a quick exposition on how to separate structural changes (architecture, paying down tech debt) from behavioral changes (new features, bug fixes). You need both, and you can use economics as a guide for when to invest in one or the other. But you need to treat them differently.
Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personal POV: I mostly read Fantasy books and a little bit of SF, but the main points I would say is better visualization. Reading textbooks gives you understanding, but being able to reconstruct scenes and characters just from a few lines is a nice plus. When reading story from a ticket, it's become much easier to visualize a concrete use case. Also empathy building. Manuals and documentation are very dry and text i…
Do you mean visualising a mental imagery? Because I wonder if I never could enjoy fiction and anything with long descriptions of a scene or what something looks like because I couldn't see the image and other people do? E.g. I might have aphantasia? I like the idea of learning about human psychology though.
You might indeed. I do as well, and the long scenery descriptions are basically fluff to me, adding nothing to the experience. That said, I quite enjoy fiction, so that must be something else.
Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?
#120harry potter
lord of the rings
dune
game of thrones
berserk
vinland saga
robinson curso
: happy reading time!!!