11 ms·

Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?

• nokeya 2y ago
  Maybe not so obvious, but - Stephen King’s “On writing”. When I read it ages ago, found funny how writing the books is similar to writing the code.
• MrDresden 2y ago
  Late to this but as I don't see it suggested, then the following page can really come in handy when wanting book suggestions from HN. https://hackernewsbooks.com/ https://hackernewsbooks.com/ I have no affiliation.
• BarbaryCoast 2y ago
  A lot will depend on where you are in your maturity as a programmer. And what sort of work you want to do. I've always done well following Don Lancaster's advice: Hit the basics, HARD. Most modern software "innovations" are really just a restatement of David Parnas' paper from 1971. He suggested programs should be split up so that the data used by modules can't be affected by the other modules. "Data hiding." Once you get a grounding in the history and literature of programming (which all other professions do without thinking), you'll start to see the "sameness" among all the supposed difference. Once you see the "sameness", you'll know what is truly important to know/master, and what is not. As a recent grad, I'll tell you that the first thing I learned was to ignore all the "software engineering" stuff that schools teach. The reality is that I would be asked, "Build a tool to do X". So I'd start through the process, building a design and the data flows, starting to build the code. Then I'd get "It also has to do Y." And I'd have to throw away most of what was written. Eventually, I learned the two rules Ken Thompson taught: 1) give users something useful in two week, not the whole problem solved. 2) when in doubt, use brute force. That's it. With attention to fundamentals, you can clearly see that "Agile" is just a bunch of fancy words (and vendors selling tools) telling you to do that same thing. Only Ken talked about that in the 70's. What you'll find is that getting a tool into the hands of users will generate new features based on what it already does. No more blue-sky wishes. And it will allow the tool to evolve into what they really want it to do. Which no one ever knows when they start. All the best software followed that path to greatness. (Which you'll see when you read the history of your chosen profession.) So learn the history. Learn how computers work (not the "Von Neumann" stuff). Get a computer engineering book and learn about bit-slicing and clocks and microcode. It doesn't matter that you're not a hardware guy; you need to know what your code is actually doing, down on the metal. Never stop learning. Read constantly. Read books you'll never find a job with, like SICP. (I once had to write a loop in a language without a loop construct. But I had read SICP, so I knew if it supported recursion, I could make a loop. And I did.) Don't read trash. Don't bother with the "current hotness"; if it's good, it's probably just a restatement of the old and if it's bad, it'll go away. I'll just leave with an ancient aphorism: 40 can't tell 20. There's just a gap between what an older person has learned about the world, and what a younger person imagines the world to be. That different can be called "experience", but the fact is I remember perfectly the pearls of wisdom dropped on my by the "old men"...and 20 years later, I was them. So I offer this small essay, knowing it'll probably be rejected, but hoping that just this once it does some good for someone.
  • no-exist 2y ago
    Your essay is filled with strong and agreeable opinions. I appreciate that I get to learn about them from a recent graduate. Thanks.
• TheAlchemist 2y ago
  2 books I consider excellent: - A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout - Domain-driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software by Eric Evans They both manage to explain some ideas that are really important, in a very simple way (which makes me feel like an idiot).
• Jtsummers 2y ago
  The Mythical Man-Month and The Design of Everyday Things are not out of date, even if older texts. The Pragmatic Programmer is also still worth a read and received an update since that list was created. EDIT: An old book (also received an update) I'd add is The Psychology of Computer Programming by Weinberg. More descriptive than prescriptive compared to many other books, written in and about the same period as The Mythical Man-Month.
  • smusamashah 2y ago
    Just want to add vote for Design of Everyday Things. If you are into creating anything that other people use (software, code, appliances, doors), you should read this book.
    • CuriousSkeptic 2y ago
      Just be warned. You're going to spend a couple of weeks after having read it being very frustrated with people influencing your world who apparently didn’t read it…
• tjr 2y ago
  I would say it's still worth reading The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. I'm sure some of the examples are antiquated, but it's a really interesting book. Programming Pearls too would still be worth reading
• wenc 2y ago
  This book surprised me by how good it is -- it distills a lot of tribal knowledge about how software engineering works at the mid-level to (early) senior engineering levels, based on the author's experience working at SV companies. https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Engineer-Engineering-Disproportionate-Meaningful/dp/0996128107 https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Engineer-Engineering-Dispro... If you're experienced (senior or higher), it's still a good read, but fewer things will surprise you.
• Fannon 2y ago
  If you're also interested in Software Architecture (at least the high-level), then I can also recommend https://architectelevator.com/book/ https://architectelevator.com/book/ by Gregor Hohpe (who also wrote another long-time classic: Enterprise Integration Patterns). Another one I found very helpful is Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann.
• djaouen 2y ago
  Designing Data Intensive Applications
  • gaws 2y ago
    Seconding. This book will get you hired.
  • anacrolix 2y ago
    The main thing I learned from this book was about LSMs and it solidified my understanding of B trees. I think I'd mostly overrated tho.
• curtis3389 2y ago
  Domain-Driven Design is fantastic. Test-Driven Design by Example is a good (and fun) read.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• rado_stankov 2y ago
  The top book imho is The Pragmatic Programer. Here some other recomendations - Designing Data-Intensive Applications - Tidy First?: A Personal Exercise in Empirical Software Design - A Philosophy of Software Design - Refactoring UI - The Software Engineer's Guidebook - https://blog.rstankov.com/programing-books/ https://blog.rstankov.com/programing-books/
• dboreham 2y ago
  The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Surrounded by Idiots Meditations
  • thelastinuit 2y ago
    wait a minute... i see what you did here...
• ChoHag 2y ago
  Terry Pratchett.
• almostgotcaught 2y ago
  Controversial take: reading books to get better at software is like reading books to get better at swimming. Like people don't get better at math by reading books about math... So you should go read code. But reading code is boring if you're not also writing code (same goes for math) so my real recommendation is to go find a big OSS project in an area you're interested in and start contributing. If you don't know how to start doing that, pick one with a GitHub and go look through the issues. Any serious project will have a label like `easy` or `first PR`, respond to one of those and tag one of the contributors asking something like "can you give me a code pointer so I can get started". And off you go - guaranteed to make you better at software if you do it for long enough.
  • bubblyworld 2y ago
    I agree with the gist of your comment but I think people can benefit from books about maths. A classic example that comes to mind is Polya's "How to Solve It". It's about the meta of doing maths (or the tacit knowledge of a great mathematician), not about specific fields or theorems.
    • almostgotcaught 2y ago
      Yes if you know absolutely nothing about writing proofs then polya's book is good. But that's it - after that "onboarding" you're never going to see a professional mathematician reading another such book.
      • bubblyworld 2y ago
        I still got stuff out of it during my PhD (in mathematics, though I never finished). I think you might underestimate the value of tacit-knowledge-type stuff, especially from skilled mathematicians like Polya. It's interesting to see how they tackle hard problems, and to compare it to how you would do the same - at the very least I have a much less developed philosophy about it. Terrence Tao has blog posts about his problem-solving meta as well, that are interesting (to me) for similar reasons.
  • 2y ago
• boyka 2y ago
  Not a manual, handbook, or guide per se - but I've learned an awful lot from reading Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming
• anonymoushn 2y ago
  It's probably useful to un-read Clean Code, though I don't really have a recommendation for a good replacement. The replacement is something like "Make a lot of mistakes and develop good taste based on your experience." If you're interested in performance, you can read https://algorithmica.org/ https://algorithmica.org/ and https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf
  • dimgl 2y ago
    I keep seeing this online. Why? Clean Code was instrumental in my improvement as an engineer. Is there a reason why this is the opinion nowadays?
    • ImPleadThe5th 2y ago
      I think it depends. For me, I can see how it helps a brand new developer get a feel for code style. That being said, some of the advice in the book is simply dated, some of it seems to break code down arbitrarily instead of on responsibility. On top of this, you get people who pedantically follow it and don't let a team of experienced engineers develop a style that works for them it's really annoying and it can make the codebase a bitch to work on. In the end, it should be a guide. And you should be thinking about what bits to take. But what ends up happening is "uncle Bob says...".
    • elric 2y ago
      "Clean code", when not applied judiciously, tends to result in overly complex code with a lot of repetition. This may be desirable when very strict decoupling is needed in complex projects, but in many projects it makes things worse rather than better.
    • curtis3389 2y ago
      I also love Clean Code and think it unfairly gets a bad rap, but here's a great, sometimes hostile, conversation with the author that touches on the issues: https://github.com/unclebob/cmuratori-discussion/blob/main/cleancodeqa.md https://github.com/unclebob/cmuratori-discussion/blob/main/c... The linked video is also a good watch.
• theshrike79 2y ago
  Peopleware is 100% worth it still today. You’ll just get angry when writing it. We had written down solutions to problems with teams and offices in 50 years ago but just refused to follow them.
• optymizer 2y ago
  I would split the books into two categories: those that improve the way you structure your code and deliver a software solution, and those that improve your technical understanding of the software platform and the computer you're using. The first are books like Pragmatic Programmer, Mythical Man Month, Code Complete, Design Patterns, talks by Alan Kay on software systems and OOP, even Game Engine Architecture etc. A lot of the content there is distilled experience which is much faster to learn from a book than gain the hard way on the job. The other books are practical deep dives. Here I would recommend a variety of books like Inside the Machine by Stokes, Computer Architecture by Hennessy, 21st Century C by Klemens, Crafting Interpreters by Nystrom, Compilers by Aho, Effective Java, Nature of Code by Shiffman, Ray Tracing Challenge by Buck, Hands on Hacking by Hickey, and others, depending on your interest and area of focus.
  • skydhash 2y ago
    I split my library alongside the same line. One section to answer the following questions: Why should I do it, how should I do it, how should I not do it, how does it work,.. and the other section answer the following: What to do, what to use,... The first one helps decision and planning, the second is what you use. So there's the philosophy of the craft which are mostly the core skills of software engineering (or engineering in general). Problem solving, project planning, resources planning, methodologies,... Then the various theories (computer science). Algorithms, Data Structures, Computer organization, Networking, Databases, Operating Systems,... And then the skills. Programming Languages, Libraries, Tools (editors, shells, build systems, debuggers, test runners). Being a good programmer involves being fairly knowledgeable in all three.
  • akkad33 2y ago
    Why is Effective Java in the second group?
• faloppad 2y ago
  More overarching: The Phoenix Project For a good understanding of the basics of architecture: https://www.amazon.com/Web-Application-Architecture-Principles-Protocols/ https://www.amazon.com/Web-Application-Architecture-Principl...
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• jdougan 2y ago
  Death March by Ed Yourdon.
• weinzierl 2y ago
  "A Philosophy of Software Design" by Stanford's John Ousterhout is excellent. It is quite concise (about 190 pages), but in my opinion, it includes all the essential information that the other books in that category would teach you. It leaves out a lot of cruft that over the years turned out to be non-issues (code styling, problems that come with object oriented programming, etc.) but occasionally - when the topic is popular and widespread (e.g. Uncle Bob advice) - addresses them as alternative opinions. It was first published in 2018 and is therefore not in the out-of-date category. So I would recommend it as essential read, hands down. If you want something a bit more elaborate: "The Pragmatic Programmer" has a 20th Anniversary Edition. It is a timeless classic, worth reading at any rate. That being said, I wish there was a single consistent resource[1] that summarizes truly modern software design philosophy in the sense that it leaves the object orientation inspired ideas behind that did not turn out to be useful and focusses on typed functional programming. Maybe with examples in Typescript and Rust. [1] Possibly a book, but not necessarily. For me it would be important that it presents a consistent opinion, so it should be from a single author or small group of authors. The information I have in mind is mostly there, but spread out over many blog posts from people with slightly different takes and ideas about them. The overwhelming majority of recommendations in this thread are from authors I'd consider part of the founding generation. I'd love to read about software design from the perspective of a younger generation.
  • tejinderss 2y ago
    > That being said, I wish there was a single consistent resource[1] that summarizes truly modern software design philosophy in the sense that it leaves the object orientation inspired ideas behind that did not turn out to be useful and focusses on typed functional programming. Maybe with examples in Typescript and Rust. Not Rust or TS, but i found Java to Kotlin a decent book which provides refactoring of java OOP to more functional patterns. One of the authors Nat Pryce was big into OOP design and was also a co-author of famous book Growing Object Oriented Software by Tests.
  • ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
    I went on a long email back and forth with the author because this was the one book that opened my eyes so much that I did't know why the Ruby community (of which I was a part of then, but am no longer) would break so many of the principles of the book. Maybe the only book that has actual made me a better programmer that I can objectively measure.
• Loic 2y ago
  Totally different suggestion, look at how good woodworkers[0] or artisans are creating there pieces. These are unique pieces but reusing common well mastered technics. It takes time for them. It takes time for us. The small details are ironed out along the way but the big picture, the concept, is defined/designed before. Note that I really like the books listed up to now, they are not "dependency injection in Typescript using framework x, y or z" kind of books, more general philosophy of coding (with people). Going to this upper level is for me where you go from good to great. And myself, going to my 50s, I am still learning... [0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sL96mw1uCmA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sL96mw1uCmA
• dusanh 2y ago
  The already mentioned The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition is so far the best I have read. It's not overly specific to one single thing, it tries to teaches general principles and good practice.[1] I also have a personal recommendation for when you want to better understand testing, QA, or want to/have to work with QA people. [2] [1] https://pragprog.com/titles/tpp20/the-pragmatic-programmer-20th-anniversary-edition/ https://pragprog.com/titles/tpp20/the-pragmatic-programmer-2... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Lessons-Learned-Software-Testing-Context-Driven/dp/0471081124 https://www.amazon.com/Lessons-Learned-Software-Testing-Cont...
• okaleniuk 2y ago
  I would advice not to concentrate on coding per se. Coding fashion is volatile, today's good practice is a tomorrow's code smell. So instead of "programmer's books" I would suggest How Big Things are Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Den Gardner. It's a new book (2023) and while it touches software engineering a bit, as the title suggest, it's more about getting big things done.
• mo_42 2y ago
  The Programmer's Brain by Felienne Hermans
• elric 2y ago
  The Passionate Programmer is still high up in my list. It's more about ways to get better at software engineering, and less about specific tools or technologies. Depending on the tech stack you're interested in, I would also strongly suggest reading foundational books that go deep into that platform (e.g. the Java Language Specification if you're into Java [1]). These are not things you necessarily need to read end-to-end or understand completely, but your global understanding of your chosen platform will expand significantly. Systems Performance by Brendan Gregg is another useful classic. While it's about performance, it touches upon a huge number of important topics (from memory allocation to pretty graphs), perusing it will make you smarter. [1] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/ https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/
• jumploops 2y ago
  The Mythical Man-Month[0] “Old” but amazingly relevant today. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
• einszwei 2y ago
  Unwritten Laws of Engineering by W.J. King from 1940. This has nothing about software engineering in particular but a useful list of Do's and Don't for workplace. You would be surprised how much of this is relevant today.
• thehappyfellow 2y ago
  I’ll have two recommendations. 1. A Philosophy of Software Design is very good. Not the whole of it but it’s short and to the point. 2. Fiction, as diverse as possible. I apologise for making assumptions but many software engineers are secretly lacking in understanding other people, what kind of of life experiences that have, how they think about the world, what is important for them. If you work with people it is going to be useful. Also, it’ll enrich your life and you’ll have more to talk about during coffee breaks :)
  • pbrw 2y ago
    Point 2. is interesting. Is it your personal experience or you have some sources to explore that topic?
    • alok-g 2y ago
      Am not the OP, however, I have similar observations too. I noted that people who read fiction often handle various life's situations better. My hypothesis is that this would be because they get broader exposure to life's situations than what non-fiction books deliver in practice. I wish there were a lot more non-fiction books dealing with common and uncommon life's situations, which step out of the theory towards what actually happens in practice.
      • mewpmewp2 2y ago
        Could you give some more specific examples of such situations?
        • alok-g 2y ago
          Love and relationships, rejection, failures, etc. When I was in middle to high school, I had no good understanding on how to handle these. Later too, have struggled with some situations. There have been situations that were nowhere talked about in any coursework and are somewhat rare that many people do not have experience with them. Movies sometimes talk about various situations, however, deal lesser with practical situations. I found that a few people around who understood these better and were known to be more mature had all been reading fiction books from middle school.
• dmitrygr 2y ago
  Alice in Wonderland
  • fabianholzer 2y ago
    The sequel "Through the Looking-Glass" contains one of the most fitting parables on software engineering ever written: The Red Queen's race...
• Scarblac 2y ago
  Wondering what people's opinion on the _Domain Driven Design_ book is.
  • misterflibble 2y ago
    I'm eager to hear other opinions on Eric's DDD book too :-D I still don't understand it!
    • john_the_writer 2y ago
      Waist of time.
  • john_the_writer 2y ago
    I'll be honest. I hated it. Any book that contains the text "obviously ..." loses my trust. I can't respect an author who's too lazy to make his point. He used it quite a few times in the beginning of the book. "Obviously" is used for two reasons. Derision, or to escape criticism. I'm obviously right. Now the real critique. The book assumes experts are on hand to ask, and that terms don't change. I worked at a place where what we called user changed 3 times in 4 years. Runners/workers/producers. You would know when a bit of code was written based on the names for users in the api. It also assumes that all experts agree. I worked on an education app where teachers in schools were the experts. Different schools in the same city had different terms for the same thing. So which expert do you trust. Is it a trunk or a boot? Is it an elevator or a lift? And that's if you're writing an app for english only speaking experts. Finally, we have to understand the mind of the dev, to know how they organised their walls. The dev that left the company 5 years ago.
  • lurking15 2y ago
    It's a nice system but far too complicated for the world we live in, where most tech companies, especially banks, are filled with imported labor or outsourced globally. DDD requires a certain discipline and dedication I just haven't seen in my career across many companies. Good luck getting more than a handful of people to not only digest the big books but also structure all their code and company around practicing it.
• physicsguy 2y ago
  Designing Data Intensive Applications is a great book. I read this years ago and regularly recommend it, especially when people are all over talking about some special queue or database technology. I find so many people don’t understand even how databases work and it’s crucial to application performance and structuring. Adding queues works to relieve server load but if you get swamped by messages you need to make an active decision on how to handle that - and maybe a queue isn’t the best idea if you can’t lose them.
• jimbob45 2y ago
  I feel that I learned a lot from Joel Spolsky's blog (the top 10, in particular) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/
  • john_the_writer 2y ago
    His book is a great read. Had me laughing out of the box.
• xiphias2 2y ago
  Look at Casey Murrey's Clean Code horrible performance youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD5NrevFtbU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD5NrevFtbU I also watched clean code videos and used it in practice, and why it _felt_ right my code size blew up and actually it got harder to understand by other people instead of easier. Nowdays my main guidelines are getting a balance between less lines of code (while still readable), readable variable names and better performance. Also I may get hate here for it, but I learned a lot from watching George Hotz programming tinygrad (available on YouTube).
• noufalibrahim 2y ago
  I think it makes sense to create a book list and have a yearly target for them. One book a month is reasonable for medium sized books. HEre are some that I found useful. 1. The Practice of Programming 2. Programming Pearls 3. Go Programming Language 4. Architecture of Open Source applications - https://aosabook.org/en/ https://aosabook.org/en/
• eddyg 2y ago
  Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud (2nd Edition) https://www.brendangregg.com/systems-performance-2nd-edition-book.html https://www.brendangregg.com/systems-performance-2nd-edition... and BPF Performance Tools https://www.brendangregg.com/bpf-performance-tools-book.html https://www.brendangregg.com/bpf-performance-tools-book.html
• john_the_writer 2y ago
  Joel on software hasn't been mentioned. It's a great book. Might be a bit dated, but it's a super fun read, and smart.
• indigo0086 2y ago
  Unvle Bob even gave up on clean code and just chose clojure
• binarycoder777 2y ago
  [dead]
• kaycey2022 2y ago
  I have what might be considered an unpopular opinion here. What you’ve read already is more than enough. And most of the books that are recommended here are going to be a massive waste of time over what you’ve already read. What you’ll be better off doing is read code available in your domain of interest.
• fiftyacorn 2y ago
  I think learning about how your applications will be supported once live is important so always recommend the Google SRE book. I think the most important chapter is on Simplicity of your build and code. Definitely worth a read
• jamil7 2y ago
  SICP and designing data intensive applications.
• naveen99 2y ago
  Similar discussions: https://pastebin.com/eCRrLakN https://pastebin.com/eCRrLakN
• switch007 2y ago
  How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnagie
• max_ 2y ago
  Life would be so much better if Devs were familiar with the UNIX Philosophy — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
• austin-cheney 2y ago
  Here are the subjects where I see both beginner and experienced developers fail and yet what separates the children from the adults in the room. So read absolutely any (multiple) books on these subjects: * measuring things (evidence gathering, performance, comparisons, stats, research). Most developers cannot do this on any level and yet have the balls (stupidity) to advocate so boldly for their opinions. * data structures. There is a very old best practice: composition over inheritance. That advice runs far deeper than it sounds because all aspects of a good application should be interchangeable and extensible structures. That applies to both theory like functional programming as well as practical like interfaces, APIs, and data in transport. * writing. Programming, in the brain, is no different than writing an essay in natural language. It requires executive planning, expression, organization, and refactoring. The better you get at writing prose, articles, and proposals the easier it gets to write the first draft of an original application. It’s so much more than just writing documentation and most programmers struggle with all of this. * transmission. Read the protocol RFCs and attempt to write original implementations. Most programmers cannot do this and yet a deeper understanding of data in movement will provide capabilities you, and your competition, can never before imagine.
• lumb63 2y ago
  Others have given a lot of good suggestions about books for general software engineering. Some book on how to structure code and some book on how to be a professional and some book on the human aspect of the profession would all be beneficial. Pick one that covers each of these areas and they’ll provide you a good foothold. I’m surprised I don’t see more advice to read a language- or domain-specific book. If you know what type of technology you want to work on and what language(s) you want to use, I’d read a book or two to gain expert-level understanding of those languages or domains. I cannot tell you how beneficial it has been to me to read books covering all the intricacies of C, C++, and Rust. Not to mention countless pages of documentation covering the Linux kernel, shell scripting, etc. Even if you have great general software engineering skill, you still have to be able to quickly read, write, understand, and modify the code you work on. You never know when you might find yourself 50 files deep in an exploration of why some open source software behaves a certain way that’s really boiling your blood, or when you need to parse the code to find an undocumented feature you’re certain exists (or, if not, to hack it in). Knowing the language is very beneficial for this, and getting eyes on open source code to recognize common patterns is very useful.
• f0e4c2f7 2y ago
  I'm a big fan of the reading list and structure of teachyourselfcs.com
• trumbitta2 2y ago
  Novels to foster and train an instinct for creative solutions.
• BrannonKing 2y ago
  This book has software engineering concepts that I never did see or hear anywhere else: "Expert C# Business Objects". Its concepts are language agnostic, even though it has C# examples. You might try some videos by the author of that book too. Related to this book is what we call "vertical feature slicing". (I'd be curious to know what other books cover this topic.) There are some Youtube videos on the topic. There was a great 2-hour video from 20 years ago that influenced me. Unfortunately, I don't remember the title and cannot find it today. The video "Simple Made Easy" had a profound influence on my programming: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/
• 2143 2y ago
  [Off-topic] I'm getting an eerie sense of Deja Vu. I remember reading this exact thread (exact question, exact replies) a few days ago. But right now it says this question was posted just 6 hours ago (right now the time is 2:35 pm 1st September UTC). Either I'm going crazy or there's a bug with the time here. @dang please tell me that I'm not going crazy, or at least that it's just a simple glitch in the matrix.
  • keiferski 2y ago
    Popular topics sometimes get reposted, with the "submitted" dates reset to reflect that. You aren't going crazy.
    • 2143 2y ago
      > with the "submitted" dates reset to reflect that Huh. Okay.
  • detaro 2y ago
    the thread was boosted, which makes it appear as if it and the old comments were posted more recently than it actually was. search "second-chance pool" to find comments from dang explaining it in more detail.
    • 2143 2y ago
      Oh! Okay! That's reassuring, thanks!
• riwsky 2y ago
  Two of the best books for software engineers are actually not specific to software engineering: * “The Design of Everyday Things”. Have you ever pushed on a pull door, or vice-versa, because it was unclear how it worked? Designers call those doors “Norman Doors”, now, after the author of this book Donald Norman so effectively dissected and criticized them (among plenty other objects). Too many APIs suffer similar problems—and if you don’t want yours to, this book is a great place to start. * “On Writing Well”, by William Zinsser. Good code and good prose have a lot in common: they know what they’re trying to do, are stripped to their clearest components, and have internal structure that supports understanding. Add to that the fact you’ll be writing lots of prose anyway (design docs, postmortems, etc), and the value of writing well should be clear.
• tmtvl 2y ago
  Paradigms of AI Programming by Peter Norvig is excellent.
• mplutecki 2y ago
  The best book about software engineering I found so far: https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book
• aronowb14 2y ago
  When I first graduated I read a bunch of tech focused books: they’re all helpful but I think practice and learning from more senior engineers is the most effective road to mastery! You can probably get away with not reading any of these books if you have good coworkers :). That being said, these have been my favorites: - designing data intensive applications (a great way of understanding systems + the basics of SRE) - the senior engineer (I love the prototyping process he lays out) - the effective engineer (lots of good gems for approaching prioritization) - debugging (by David agans)- a great resource for a formalized debugging process if you don’t have one - on writing well (I’m halfway through this, but it has been indispensable for writing tickets + messages at work)
• calebjosue 2y ago
  https://saasbook.info https://saasbook.info (Which I haven't finished lol).
• perrygeo 2y ago
  My favorite software books of the last few years: "A Philosophy of Software Design" is mentioned a lot, +1 "The Missing README" is full of pragmatic advice to get from 'my code works' to 'my code is in production'. Many of the barriers to success have nothing to do with algorithms and everything to do with the organization running the project. It's marketed to new engineers, but I think anyone who writes software would get something out of it. "Elements of Clojure" by Zach Tellman is a fantastic high-level architectural philosophy about how we build and compose abstractions. Only wish that the title wasn't tied to the Clojure programming language (most of the book is applicable to any language despite the title) and was a bit longer. "Tidy First" is the first in a series by Kent Beck, a quick exposition on how to separate structural changes (architecture, paying down tech debt) from behavioral changes (new features, bug fixes). You need both, and you can use economics as a guide for when to invest in one or the other. But you need to treat them differently.
• gugug6 2y ago
  harry potter lord of the rings dune game of thrones berserk vinland saga robinson curso : happy reading time!!!