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Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?

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Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?

#41

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

weinzierl wrote: post #26

"A Philosophy of Software Design" by Stanford's John Ousterhout is excellent. It is quite concise (about 190 pages), but in my opinion, it includes all the essential information that the other books in that category would teach you. It leaves out a lot of cruft that over the years turned out to be non-issues (code styling, problems that come with object oriented programming, etc.) but occasionally - when the topic is…

I went on a long email back and forth with the author because this was the one book that opened my eyes so much that I did't know why the Ruby community (of which I was a part of then, but am no longer) would break so many of the principles of the book.

Maybe the only book that has actual made me a better programmer that I can objectively measure.

Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?

#44

Post by curtis3389 »

dimgl wrote: post #17
anonymoushn wrote: post #15

It'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?

I also love Clean Code and think it unfairly gets a bad rap, but here's a great, sometimes hostile, conversation with the author that touches on the issues:

https://github.com/unclebob/cmuratori-discussion/blob/main/c...

The linked video is also a good watch.

Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?

#45

Post by pbrw »

thehappyfellow wrote: post #38

I’ll have two recommendations. 1. A Philosophy of Software Design is very good. Not the whole of it but it’s short and to the point. 2. Fiction, as diverse as possible. I apologise for making assumptions but many software engineers are secretly lacking in understanding other people, what kind of of life experiences that have, how they think about the world, what is important for them. If you work with people it is go…

Point 2. is interesting. Is it your personal experience or you have some sources to explore that topic?

Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?

#46

Post by FriedrichN »

thehappyfellow wrote: post #38

I’ll have two recommendations. 1. A Philosophy of Software Design is very good. Not the whole of it but it’s short and to the point. 2. Fiction, as diverse as possible. I apologise for making assumptions but many software engineers are secretly lacking in understanding other people, what kind of of life experiences that have, how they think about the world, what is important for them. If you work with people it is go…

I'll second the recommendation of fiction (I love the classics) and add a recommendation for reading philosophy and specifically the history of philosophy. Learning how our frame thinking evolved from the time of the Greeks to the middle ages to more modern times has been nothing short of illuminating for me personally. I don't think you need to read the original works or the really academic stuff (you can if you want to) but having a feel of how our thinking got to be is really useful.

Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?

#47

Post by almostgotcaught »

d0mine wrote: post #36
almostgotcaught wrote: post #12

Controversial take: reading books to get better at software is like reading books to get better at swimming. Like people don't get better at math by reading books about math... So you should go read code. But reading code is boring if you're not also writing code (same goes for math) so my real recommendation is to go find a big OSS project in an area you're interested in and start contributing. If you don't know how…

it is not either or. You can do both. I'm sure a swimmer who reads books about swimming in addition to swimming is better all else being equal than a swimmer who just swims.

> who reads books about swimming

Can you show me such a book? Ie a book that teaches one to swim (different strokes etc) aimed at a professional swimmer (athlete).

Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?

#48

Post by xiphias2 »

Look at Casey Murrey's Clean Code horrible performance youtube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD5NrevFtbU

I also watched clean code videos and used it in practice, and why it _felt_ right my code size blew up and actually it got harder to understand by other people instead of easier.

Nowdays my main guidelines are getting a balance between less lines of code (while still readable), readable variable names and better performance.

Also I may get hate here for it, but I learned a lot from watching George Hotz programming tinygrad (available on YouTube).

Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?

#49

Post by noufalibrahim »

I think it makes sense to create a book list and have a yearly target for them. One book a month is reasonable for medium sized books. HEre are some that I found useful.

1. The Practice of Programming 2. Programming Pearls 3. Go Programming Language 4. Architecture of Open Source applications - https://aosabook.org/en/

Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?

#50

Post by noufalibrahim »

almostgotcaught wrote: post #47
d0mine wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is not either or. You can do both. I'm sure a swimmer who reads books about swimming in addition to swimming is better all else being equal than a swimmer who just swims.

> who reads books about swimming Can you show me such a book? Ie a book that teaches one to swim (different strokes etc) aimed at a professional swimmer (athlete).

Can't show you one for swimming but if you're a karateka, then you can do worse that spending some time reading books like the Bubishi
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