Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?

A Pattern Language by by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language

From a blog post ( http://the-whiteboard.github.io/book/review/2016/02/17/five-... ) I wrote a bit ago...

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The first thing that will come to mind when seeing that title is “ug, another book on patterns.” Or maybe “I thought it was named Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software”

This isn’t anything like that book. Or maybe it should be. The full title of the book is A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. Yes, this is a book about architecture - but not software architecture. It is about the houses and buildings that we walk live and work in.

The description of A Pattern Language is one that will sound very familiar to people familiar with Design Patterns:

> It is shown [in The Timeless Way of Building], that towns and buildings will not become alive, unless they are made by all the people in society, and unless these people share a common pattern language, within which to make these buildings, and unless this common pattern language is alive itself.

> In this book we present one possible pattern language, of the kind called for in The Timeless Way. This language is extremely practical. It is a language that we have distilled from our own building and planning efforts over the last eight years. You can use it to work with your neighbors, to improve your town and neighborhood. You can use it to design a house for yourself, with your family; or to work with other people to design an office or a workshop or a public building like a school. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction.

> The elements of this language are entities called patterns. Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice. This is the book that inspired Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vissides.

By reading A Pattern Language you will be able to understand what the authors of Design Patterns were trying to do and how design patterns were intended to work.

It’s a good book too, who knows what else you will find useful in it. Pattern #146 describes a flexible office space. Pattern #148 describes a workspace for small work groups, #151 is about small meeting rooms, #152 is a half private office. Everyone who works in today’s world of computers and cubes, can use these ideas to conceptualize and consider improvements to the office.

Books I'll treasure forever:

    - Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment by Stevens
    - Operating Systems: Design and Implementation by Tanenbaum
    - The Art of Unix Programming by ESR
    - Parsing Techniques by Grune and Jacobs
    - Applied Cryptography by Schneier

Agreed. Scheme itself is "not much of s language." It's like a language-agnostic language.

Code complete

Refactoring

Patterns of enterprise architecture

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Program (it's written in scheme but it's mostly for convenience and its lack of syntax).

Definitely the best book I've read on programming.