I would recommend "Sorting and Searching" Volume 3 from Donald Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming". Fantastic, in-depth read.
Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
41–50 of 344 posts
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#42A short book (25 pages), but I find it worth mentioning here -
6 Things About Programming That Every Computer Programmer Should Know -
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Things-Programming-Computer-Program...
A really well written short glimpse of things every programmer must know.
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#43If you liked Clean Code, read Clean Coder. A quick summary:
Robert C. Martin introduces the disciplines, techniques, tools, and practices of true software craftsmanship. This book is packed with practical advice–about everything from estimating and coding to refactoring and testing. It covers much more than technique: It is about attitude.
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#44- Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#45Programming Pearls.
Great short book to get you thinking creatively and how to dissect algorithmic problems, language agnostic with pseudocode examples.
Non-programming but still highly relevant for a professional programmer: Mythical Man Month, and Peopleware.
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#46Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter is about the intersection of music, math, and computers.
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#47Any good book on statistics would be a huge asset, as well as a book about debugging strategies.
> as well as a book about debugging strategies
Any examples of books focused on that? I can't think of any.
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#48Let Over Lambda. Not entirely agnostic, but delves into Forth, Smalltalk, C, Scheme, and Perl while overall being about Lisp. Fascinating book; really a look at metaprogramming (macros) and closures (that's what "let over lambda" is).
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#49Effective Java (lots of good generic OOP advice) Implementing Domain Driven Design
Although I liked Effective Java a lot, and it does contain a lot of advice relevant to many OO languages - it is the opposite of language agnostic: It's very Java-specific. Much of the content is irrelevant except in Java itself; and some of it is the opposite of "Effective language X". For example, it has a section named "Prefer lists to Arrays"; any C++ programmer will tell you the opposite (and that goes down to s…
Yeah some chapters were useless for me, but I still took away a lot from that book as a PHP developer.
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#50Definitely, definitely, Kernighan and Plauger's 1976 book _Software Tools_. The code is in RATFOR (a structured dialect of FORTRAN) but all the ideas are language-independent. It remains, four decades on, the best book I have ever read on how to solve the real problems of real program development. Very practical, and covers a vast amount of ground. (As it happens, I am re-reading it right now.)