Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. Found it to be a very well written book with simple but useful todos.
Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?
51–60 of 106 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?
#52Finally picked up Strunk and White after years of procrastination and so far it has been a tour-de-force consolidating/spelling out the knowledge I picked up along the way (ESL). I found mentally swapping out words about writing for words about programming to be fun.
Brian Kernighan (the K in K&R and AWK) also wrote a similar book
with P. J. Plauger called "The Elements of Programming Style" [1].
There's even a talk by him about it online (2009) [2].
Kernighan also co-authored a (imo) really great book with Rob Pike (once an assistant of Penn & Teller [3]) called "The Practice of Programming" [4]. Unfortunately, this one is a bit over the 200 page limit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Programming_St...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SUkrR7ZfTA
[3] https://youtu.be/z4iVAcYyWN0?t=180
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming
Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?
#53Thank you for this "Ask HN"
ever since I became a parent,
the only books I'm able to finish are the ones that are 200 pages or less.
Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?
#54Ullman, 'Elements of ML Programming'. It's where I learned functional programming back in the 1990's, and I still think it's one of the clearest expositions around. Yes, it's the same Ullman who wrote the dragon book.
Ullman's book is really accessible and what introduced me to SML as well,
but for those looking for something that goes a little deeper,
do read "ML for the Working Programmer" by Lawrence Paulson (author of Isabelle).
It has one of the best introductions to ML's module system
and even covers building a (toy) tactical theorem prover.
Oh, and it's now available online for free as well [1].
Another great book on FP is "The Functional Approach to Programming" [2], which is a bit like SICP but using Caml (OCaml without the O) instead of Scheme.
Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?
#55Dan Luu's programming book list (https://danluu.com/programming-books/) is a great resource. I bought the Dasgupta Algorithms book from that recommendation. (I've just started it so I can't say much about it yet.)
Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?
#56Yes, programming book notes for specific languages for software developers
Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?
#57Finally picked up Strunk and White after years of procrastination and so far it has been a tour-de-force consolidating/spelling out the knowledge I picked up along the way (ESL). I found mentally swapping out words about writing for words about programming to be fun.
Kingsley Amis 'A guide to modern usage', a similar choice for non-Americans.
Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?
#58Some classic old textbooks are about that size but they are very dense. A Discipline aof Programming comes to mind. It's about deriving imperative code from the weakest precondition you need to give to the next statement and about proving programs correct with a big emphasis on loop termination.
Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?
#59For those of you who claim to start and finish a book in a weekend, are you spending literally the entire weekend doing nothing by reading? Do you take breaks? Do you speed read? Do you take notes? What's your strategy?
I'll say if you are not taking breaks, and notes then you are only wasting your time.
A book should be savored. Re-read many times.
Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?
#60"The Elements of Style", by Strunk & White. 92 pages.
For example, page 19: "Put statements in positive form."
Code is improved if booleans are put in positive form, such as replace:
if (!featureIsDisabled()) ...
if (hasFeature()) ...