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Ask HN: Best programming books in the last couple of years?
Have a personal budget to spend mainly on programming books and was wondering what are some of the better ones recently? Question is deliberately open ended with no particular focus on specific domains, nevertheless a small summary why a given book is great value would be appreciated.
- mtmail 4y agoRelated "Ask HN: What are the best tech books you read in 2021?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29688332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29688332
- adg001 4y agoWe may not want to regard Knuth's latest volume, V 4B, in the The Art of Computer Programming series as a book authored only over the last couple of years, but, yeah, it has just gone into print [0]; HN reaction here [1]. [0] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news.html#v4b https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news.html#v4b [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33082128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33082128
- dev_0 4y agoIt’s useless in real life
- nnoitra 4y agouseless everywhere basically. No sane person would sit down and read TAOCP.
- bear8642 4y agoHard disagree - I'd consider it the encyclopedia of Computer Science. Yes, might not be great to read in entirety but found very useful exploring some search algorithms recently - KMP and Boyer-Moore both explored in the excruciating detail I needed
- dev_0 4y agoIt's damn hard to read. There are better writers
- a_w 4y ago"Nobody ever taught me about a B tree. I had heard of it. When I went to write my own B tree, on the bookshelf behind me, I’ve got Don Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, so I just pulled that down, I flipped to the chapter on searching and looked up B trees and he described the algorithm. That’s what I did. "Funny thing, Don gives us details on the algorithm for searching a B tree and for inserting into a B tree. He does not provide an algorithm for deleting from the B tree. That’s an exercise at the end of the chapter, so before I wrote my own B tree I had to solve the exercise at the end. Thanks, Don. I really appreciate it. "Adam: That’s awesome. Did you pull anything else from that book? "Richard: Well, it’s an amazing volume. I can’t give you a specific example, but from my era, everybody has to have read or at least skimmed through, at least browsed through The Art of Computer Programming, and know that algorithms that are there, maybe not Don’s exact implementation. I mean, I never took the time to learn MIX, which is his assembly language, but it’s useful to flip through and look at all the algorithms he talks about. I think that just a year or two ago I needed a pseudorandom number generator, and I was, “Let’s see what Don recommends.” You pull it off. You see what he does." https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/ https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/
- ilovhn 4y agoWho reads this... and why. Some passion is involved i guess.
- dev_0 4y agoDDIA…….
- endorphine 4y agoStands for "Designing Data-Intensive Applications".
- jjice 4y agoJust recommended to a mentee of mine yesterday referring to it as "one of the best software books in the past few years". Weird coincidence. It really is good, but not super actionable by a lot of engineers since they aren't in a position where they need distributed data or message queues or other interesting tech.
- jstx1 4y agoI’m not sure how the book helps even if you do need distributed databases and message queues.
- kedean 4y agoIt's very helpful for understanding the software many of us use on a daily basis though, which is extremely important. That sort of knowledge helps you evaluate when different solutions are appropriate, what their shortcomings and strengths are, and to understand why those shortcomings and strengths are there in the first place. A lot of it is things that could be explained individually, but there's really something to be said for holistic views on a topic.
- dev_0 4y agoYou will understand why you use Kalfka
- skyde 4y agoThe Rust Programming Language ISBN-13: 9781718500440
- skyde 4y agoSystems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud 1st Edition Edition ISBN-13: 978-0133390094, ISBN-10: 9780133390094
- teleforce 4y agoAgreed. Someone borrowed this book from me and then he liked it so much to pay the full price for it. Actually the 1st edition is not published recently but the 2nd edition was published a few years back.
- tmaly 4y agoI was just looking at the preview. I would have liked to have seen more in the preface than just a quote and short paragraph.
- oweiler 4y agoSoftware Engineering At Google
- Psyladine 4y agoPetzold just released 2nd edition of Code, with additional work on CPU architecture.
- ilovhn 4y agoCracking the coding interview is really good, especially for non-seniors, you'll learn so much if you've patience (700 pages).
- silasb 4y agoI haven't read it yet, but I've skimmed over a couple parts, but I think System-Design Interview insiders Second Edition is a modern book around lots of concepts talked about on HN over the last 5-10 years. Others on my list that I think are good books: * Empowered * Soft Skills * Pragmatic Programmer * Clean Architecture * Staff Engineer by Will Larson
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y agoI think the answers would be more useful if the replies said something more than just the title.
- jainajayidiot 4y ago
- jainajayidiot 4y agoWrite code for Binary Search in Python