Any good book on statistics would be a huge asset, as well as a book about debugging strategies.
Any title ?
Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
51–60 of 344 posts
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#52Not a programming book per se, but seeing that you had "The Healthy Programmer" in your list I'll throw it out there:
"The underachievers manifesto" - a short book that does wonders for your mental health in a world that values productivity and superficial, short-sighted goals over everything else.
https://www.amazon.com/Underachievers-Manifesto-Accomplishin...
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#53Effective 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…
I haven't read the book, but I guess part of the argument is because ArrayList in Java is backed by an array, and is what is usually called a "vector" in other languages, while the generic List interface is what you would call a "sequence" elsewhere.
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#54An Introduction to General Systems Thinking. Gerald Weinberg. This book, now over 40 years old, addresses the 'core within the core' of the reality of systems. Unbelievably good, with a very light-hearted tone.
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#55Algorithmics: the Spirit of Computing by David Harel[1] is really fantastic, can't recommend it enough.
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#56Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold. I love this book.
I loved this book, a must read for any dev
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#57One that hasn't been mentioned yet: "Coders at Work". A very enlightening book about how some of the best programmers in the world approach the craft in their own words.
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#58Some of the most interesting books I've read in support of my software-development work are:
* "Compilers: Principles, Techniques, & Tools" by Aho et al. (i.e., "the dragon book")
* "Data Flow Analysis: Theory and Practice" by Khedker et al.
* "Understanding MySQL Internals" by Sasha Pachev.
* "Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques" by Gray and Reuter.
* "Fundamentals of Wireless Communication" by Tse and Viswanath.
* "Genetic Programming: An Intrduction" by Banzhaf et al.
* "Applied Crytography" by Schneier.
EDIT: A few additional comments:
(1) Although these books are problem-domain specific, some of them had benefits outside of their problem domains:
* The Dataflow book has some great coverage of fixpoint algorithms. It's really helpful to recognize when some problems are best solved by fixpoint analysis.
* The "dragon book" takes a lot of the mystery out of compilers. That's somewhat helpful when writing code that needs to be fast. It's super helpful if you want to work with compiler-related technologies such as LLVM.
* Understanding the fundamental challenges of transaction processing helps you avoid massive misadventures when dealing with databases or concurrent / multithreaded systems.
(2) YMMV, but I've found it hard to soldier through these books unless I had a need to for my job or for school.
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#59I see you read Kent Beck's TDD book. A good follow-up might be Roy Osherove's "The Art of Unit Testing." I found it to have a lot of pragmatic, practical advice. It's not the final word, but it is a good next step after Kent Beck's book. It has some C#-specific material, but that stuff is interesting to read about even if you're working in other languages.
Lot's good suggestions in this thread, here's one I didn't see:
"Software Runaways - lessons learned from massive software project failures," by Robert L. Glass.
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#60Sanzy Metz is a great teacher of object-oriented design. Read her ruby book.
"Introduction to algorithms : a creative approach" by Udi Manber. ". Great book to learn algorithm design.