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Of books that are more on the craft of programming, "Refactoring" (Also Fowler) is good. And I enjoyed "Practical Common Lisp" by Peter Seibel too.
In general, I suspect that the value of a book has more to do with where the reader is, than where the book is.
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…
What I wouldn't give for 5 more books of equal quality to PAIP...
It's essentially a list of anti-patterns to avoid. But crucial to it is the idea of clarity and avoiding misinterpretation by either human or compiler.
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Are Design Patterns really so out of fashion with the youth of today that nobody here mentions Design Patterns as their answer? Because it is mine, for better or worse. It took me from understanding OO to understanding how to build large systems with OO, writing maintainable code and using proper encapsulation. A much deeper work than Code Complete (though the latter is worth reading too). I have used functional lang…
> build large systems DP are oft misused, but I think the main idea is a pattern language - a way to communicate to other developers what the architecture is. This is especially important on larger, more complex projects with more developers and developer turnover. Understanding the architecture of a project is crucial for grokking it, but usually not well documented. Even just "DPs are naming conventions" is helpful…
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Code complete is a classic. Clean code will teach you how writing 3 line functions is a best practice. It's an overhyped, overrated book which is more damaging than helpful and one of the very few I couldn't stand to read until the end due to the authors' dogmatic views.
That's interesting, I had the complete opposite reaction to clean code. As a person that recommends this book, with full heart, to every developer, I'd like to hear any details you could spare re: why you believe it's damaging? Maybe you can provide some examples of well-written codebases and why you believe they're such? And maybe you could comment on why you feel Clean Code's principles harm readability with some e…
Having read both a long time ago, I also feel like Code Complete is the one to recommend: it covers more ground, is pragmatic, and more importantly most of its recommendations are based on studies, i.e. they come from empirical evidences. Clean Code compares poorly to this, in that it's just one guy's opinion.
That doesn't necessarily mean Clean Code is a bad book, but since our work relies primarily on logic, I'd rather have arguments presented to me logically.
Since both books cover pretty much the same ground, it makes more sense to recommend Code Complete.
Clojure Applied by Ben Vandergrift and Alex Miller. That and Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits ( https://changelog.com/posts/rich-hickeys-greatest-hits ).
Are books still state of the art in 2017? I would assume all the best knowledge could be found online for free by now.
Hyperlinked text might be better, so that you have a graph of knowledge not a searchable seq(book with chapters and an index), but there's a natural order to learning things, the teacher hopefully has an idea what order it makes sense to put the concepts in front of you in.
tldr; books are hard to beat, if something was going to beat it for me it would be a well designed, portable wiki of the book's contents, maybe with some interactive exercises. Definitely not the video lectures and homework of most online courses.
Are books still state of the art in 2017? I would assume all the best knowledge could be found online for free by now.
1) It can do wonders for focus to disable your network connection, open a book, and work through examples (but maybe I just get distracted easily). This actually applies for most tasks that involve a computer and don't need the internet.
2) Not specific to print, but a book that covers a topic in a structured, beginning-to-end way can help reduce gaps in one's knowledge. I learned a bit of BASH by just googling around and reading Stack Overflow, but reading The Linux Command Line (https://www.nostarch.com/tlcl) taught me things I wouldn't have gotten in 10 years of stack overflow browsing.