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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?

#91

Post by lumb63 »

Others have given a lot of good suggestions about books for general software engineering. Some book on how to structure code and some book on how to be a professional and some book on the human aspect of the profession would all be beneficial. Pick one that covers each of these areas and they’ll provide you a good foothold.

I’m surprised I don’t see more advice to read a language- or domain-specific book. If you know what type of technology you want to work on and what language(s) you want to use, I’d read a book or two to gain expert-level understanding of those languages or domains. I cannot tell you how beneficial it has been to me to read books covering all the intricacies of C, C++, and Rust. Not to mention countless pages of documentation covering the Linux kernel, shell scripting, etc. Even if you have great general software engineering skill, you still have to be able to quickly read, write, understand, and modify the code you work on. You never know when you might find yourself 50 files deep in an exploration of why some open source software behaves a certain way that’s really boiling your blood, or when you need to parse the code to find an undocumented feature you’re certain exists (or, if not, to hack it in). Knowing the language is very beneficial for this, and getting eyes on open source code to recognize common patterns is very useful.

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

#92

Post by no-exist »

BarbaryCoast wrote: post #51

A lot will depend on where you are in your maturity as a programmer. And what sort of work you want to do. I've always done well following Don Lancaster's advice: Hit the basics, HARD. Most modern software "innovations" are really just a restatement of David Parnas' paper from 1971. He suggested programs should be split up so that the data used by modules can't be affected by the other modules. "Data hiding." Once yo…

Your essay is filled with strong and agreeable opinions. I appreciate that I get to learn about them from a recent graduate. Thanks.

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

#93

Post by PUSH_AX »

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?

This is a short read - https://overreacted.io/goodbye-clean-code/

But it captures it perfectly, a large number of engineers go from jr to intermediate with their new found tricks. Except they cling to these tricks like it’s law, they have upskilled in one direction while sacrificing the open minded pragmatism for dogmatism. They’ll argue with you about these things, it’s in a book how can you not adhere to it!!?

If you can onboard these lessons and still recognise the spots where it’s begging for some best practice but you should break the rule this time, then congrats you’re ahead of the curve, it takes most engineers a frustratingly long time to get pragmatic. If I had a penny for every awful DRY abstraction that became impossible to reason about, I’d have retired.

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

#94

Post by cdrini »

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…

I think both are useful, and generally if you have the time to do both, you should.

For example, my go to when using a new framework or library that'll be a core part of a project, is to read its documentation in its entirety. I did this with eg Vue. It's a _huge_ time saver, and the big key, is that it reveals things you would never have known existed! They're things which you wouldn't have stumbled on yourself, but which come in handy in certain moments. Or they're things that would waste your time googling, and which might be difficult to understand out of context. The docs also let you understand the "spirit" of the tool you're using, which will let you work much more smoothly with it, and avoid unintentionally fighting with it and how it was designed to do things.

This is also true for more abstract concepts in CS, which might not come up often, but which are smart abstractions that can come into play at key moments in your projects.

Also with math, most math learning is done by books -- books with exercises, yes, but still books.

But at the end of the day, I think what matters is don't get stuck in one mode. Don't _only_ learn from books, since that won't give you the skills you need. But also don't _only_ learn by doing, since then you'll basically be wasting your time re-discovering the last 100 years of programming/CS experience. Do both!

I think an artist in YouTube summarised this best many years ago. He describes 3 ways to improve at something: innate improvement, inspired improvement, and developmental improvement. Innate improvement being by volume--i.e. if you do it every day, you'll get better even if you're not consciously trying to improve. Inspired improvement is using those bursts of inspiration/interest to propel your skills forward. And developmental improvement being the more traditional, sit down with a book and learn/practice approach. All are useful and contribute to improving, so use them all where possible! Jazza recommends making projects that allow for all three possible types of improvement.

Video: https://youtu.be/Bu3ulVhO3z4

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

#96

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

acjacobson wrote: post #61
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would you mind clarifying which one you found so helpful? The parent commenter mentioned two books

A Philosophy of Software Design - John Ousterhout

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

#97

Post by thesnide »

skydhash wrote: post #64
pbrw wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Personal POV: I mostly read Fantasy books and a little bit of SF, but the main points I would say is better visualization. Reading textbooks gives you understanding, but being able to reconstruct scenes and characters just from a few lines is a nice plus. When reading story from a ticket, it's become much easier to visualize a concrete use case. Also empathy building. Manuals and documentation are very dry and text i…

Indeed. Do DnD style tabletops with your dev team mates. Seriously. It definitely enables you to know how they operate.

And in general, it also enables you to understand the meaning of some writing for and from others.

Boosting its creativity is a nice bonus.

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

#98

Post by thesnide »

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?

Because of clueless extremists.

They don't try to understand the spirit of rules, but blindly apply rules to the letter

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

#99

Post by BrannonKing »

This book has software engineering concepts that I never did see or hear anywhere else: "Expert C# Business Objects". Its concepts are language agnostic, even though it has C# examples. You might try some videos by the author of that book too.

Related to this book is what we call "vertical feature slicing". (I'd be curious to know what other books cover this topic.) There are some Youtube videos on the topic. There was a great 2-hour video from 20 years ago that influenced me. Unfortunately, I don't remember the title and cannot find it today.

The video "Simple Made Easy" had a profound influence on my programming: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/

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

#100

Post by smusamashah »

Jtsummers wrote: post #3

The Mythical Man-Month and The Design of Everyday Things are not out of date, even if older texts. The Pragmatic Programmer is also still worth a read and received an update since that list was created. EDIT: An old book (also received an update) I'd add is The Psychology of Computer Programming by Weinberg. More descriptive than prescriptive compared to many other books, written in and about the same period as The M…

Just want to add vote for Design of Everyday Things. If you are into creating anything that other people use (software, code, appliances, doors), you should read this book.
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