Ask HN: Books That Dramatically Transformed Your Programming Skills

>The field of computer science is so vast

Its vast if you approach it top down (higher abstractions to lower abstractions), seeing all the different languages/frameworks, but if you approach it the other way, you realize that every higher abstraction is pretty simple.

When you start learning things like python, or js, and then move to things like C++/C/Rust, or learn frameworks like react, you get left with a sense that each one of those things is like a separate thing where you have to memorize patterns of how to do stuff.

When you learn from the ground up, like understanding how a CPU works, every new thing that you learn immediately fits in to what you already know as a simpler way to do a combination of low level CPU operations, and you immediately recognize patterns. Memorizing syntax becomes unnecessary, since you can figure things out on the fly.

To give you a real example, most leetcode problems that get asked in interviews pretty much involve some pointer manipulation under the hood. So when you work with enough low level C and assembly, figuring out how to do things more efficiently without copying data around, you can pretty much ace leetcode medium problems without studying.

Well, not exactly a book and not necessarily something I recommend everybody reads, but when I was getting started (early 80's) I purchased a copy of the source code to HDOS, the HeathKit Disk Operating System (written by J. Gordon Letwin, who went on to work on IBM's OS/2). I spent many months poring over every line of 8080 assembly language code in that massive set of bound photocopies of source code printouts. The OS itself, device drivers, command shell, assembler, BASIC interpreter...everything was there. I don't think anyone can realistically do the same thing on a modern system but that experience taught me so much about programming and software engineering.

Ill mention a few books and how they've helped me become a better programmer.

- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs: this helped me understand the different types of recursion; how a problem can be modeled for the code to solve and how those designs can evolve and how the paradigm I'm using (functional or OOP) can help me

- Refactoring: this book helped me understand the different patterns we can use to alter code. Giving them a name and symptoms is a great way to apply and communicate with other coders. I recommend this book to everyone.

- The little Lisper: this really helped me get recursion. Like really. Although I could use a refresher.

- Clean code: look... this book is bad. Like, really bad. But, at the time I read it, and in the languages I used (Python, C, R) we didn't have many rules on how to write and organize our programs. And I wanted to improve on that skill. And this book gave me pointers and made me think about those ideas. I don't recommend it around, because for many people Clean Code can become a dogma really easily. But if you can question and critique and reach out to other resources and is an advanced beginner to coding, I can see this book bringing value.

- An Elegant Puzzle and Staff Engineer by Will Larson: those helped me get clarity on the role of the technical team in an organization. A team that produces code as the main driver of impact in a product/service. I lump them both because I read them back to back and don't remember, exactly, which is which. But une is more focus on a tech leader and the other a tech specialist.

- Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook: whenever I need to interact with some unix technology, this book delivers in terms of giving me a nice historical view and presenting the common tooling around the tool. This helps me interact with stuff programmatically much better. Be it GRUB, X, SAMBA, this book gave me the necessary introduction I needed, much more organized and thought out and with useful references than the average blog post you will find in the wild.

And I'd like to recommend this Ask HN on problem solving books

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33797862

My first learning on data structures came from https://www.amazon.com/Definitive-XML-Schema-Priscilla-Walms...

Not a book but I learned what not to do and what to avoid in my earliest days of programming from the super opinionated tool JSLint.

This was my go to reference to learn CSS https://www.amazon.com/CSS-Pocket-Reference-Visual-Presentat...

As for language design I am mostly self taught through a lot of trial and error. For me it’s all about functions and variable scope. After that everything else is just a statement, expression or a data structure. With that I can write just about anything, make it scale, and keep it super simple to read.

Depends on your definition of "skilled" people.

I once had to work the codebase of a consultant who build up his business by having less of a T profile and more of a slightly thick, incredibly long _____ profile. His code was attrocious and borderline impossible to refactor because he never stuck to a language long and consistently enough to actually learn anything resembling code discipline or hygiene. He was always too busy learning the quirks of the language and framework, which took precedence over elegance