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

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

#102

Post by neppo »

dcw303 wrote: post #64

For C#, Framework Design Guidelines by Cwalina & Abrams. Very clear and concise pointers for well structured and easy to read code. It's a little out of date now though, wish they'd update it to a third edition.

thanks for mentioning the programming language

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

#103

Post by mikekchar »

abecedarius wrote: post #13

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…

Here I was thinking, "I was never really influenced by books. I just read and wrote a lot of code." But you've reminded me that it's just wrong. Thinking Forth. Nearly 35 years later it still probably dominates my approach.

Edit: Just realised that it is available under a CC license: http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/

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

#104

Post by UK-AL »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #44

Are books still state of the art in 2017? I would assume all the best knowledge could be found online for free by now.

Software design is relatively timeless. Your not learning technologies, your learning how build software in general.

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

#109

Post by sideshowb »

btilly wrote: post #53
sideshowb wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm nearing 50 so I'm hardly a youth. http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=133399 does a very good job of explaining why Design Patterns is a book to be careful with. By contrast Code Complete won't steer people wrong. See https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdo... for a cautionary tale about how a pursuit of OO purity can result in great verbosity, hiding intent behind a barrage of patterns. Result…

That second link is great btw. I've always felt that aspect of java was odd, and I do like modern fables :-)
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