Ask HN: What books had the greatest effect on how you structure your code?

Programming using GNU Smalltalk http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/Gnu/ProgrammingUsi...

Thinking Forth; Software Tools; SICP; Abstraction and Specification in Program Development; Essentials of Programming Languages; Paradigms of AI Programming; I'd like to list something about OO too, but no book I know really measures up to learning from other programmers. But there's Mark S. Miller's thesis Robust Composition.

(in roughly chronological order. As you can see from the chronology, it took me a long time to start to like OOP.)

On LISP, by Paul Graham. LISP was the second language I learned in college, but only after 6 years programming Java and C# that I came back and really learned LISP. It was when I realized that I was doing everything wrong. For example design patterns exists because OO has serious problems that we don't find in a functional programming language and you only see this when you understand both paradigms.

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

After reading I began to think about programming as an algebraic transformation from one system to another, in doing so radically reduced the amount of errors I made.

Of lesser-known books, Avdi Grimm's "Confident Ruby": http://www.confidentruby.com/

Learning Ruby itself was a huge influence to me; hadn't considered that a language should be designed to make programmers "happy", as Matz said. "Confident Ruby" was one of several books that had this human-happiness focus. "Confident" is broken down into patterns, many of which can be found in books like Sandi Metz's POODR, but as a semi-experienced programmer, Grimm's way of writing really appealed to me.

Even the title of the book itself was revelatory to me. The idea that the functions and methods and conventions we create should be rooted in a "confident" mentality (such as the old adage of being promiscuous in what a function accepts, and strict in what it returns) really improved the way I designed code. Not just in terms of technical proficiency, but with less cognitive burden, which ultimately leads to the elegant simplicity we desire in our work.