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"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 ess

"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 It was first published in 2018 and is therefore not in the out-of-date category.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.
- acjacobson 2y ago
  Would you mind clarifying which one you found so helpful? The parent commenter mentioned two books
  - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
    You sort of have to marinate yourself in the ideas of the book. But the big one is that you should have a very limited API. And each API function should do a lot of things. So a very narrow set of deep APIs make for the best programs. The other thing was indirection. Try avoiding it as much as possible. Languages which allow easy access to functions or lambdas or blocks being pass around, usually end up with 4 - 5 levels of function calls to get anything done. That makes things really complected together and makes it hard to reason about later.
    - loco5niner 2y ago
      and which book are you talking about?
      - RoyalSloth 2y ago
        Deep APIs were mentioned in "A Philosophy of Software Design" (John Ousterhout)
  - hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
    A Philosophy of Software Design - John Ousterhout
- thehappyfellow 2y ago
akkad33 2y ago
I read A philosophy of.. and I might as well be reading Philosophy because I didn't understand what the book was saying
microtonal 2y ago
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. I haven't read the original The Pragmatic Programmer, but picked up the 20th Anniversary Edition. Maybe it's because the original was so influential, but I didn't enjoy the 20th Anniversary Edition at all, it just full of boring platitudes.

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.

acjacobson 2y ago
Would you mind clarifying which one you found so helpful? The parent commenter mentioned two books
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  You sort of have to marinate yourself in the ideas of the book. But the big one is that you should have a very limited API. And each API function should do a lot of things. So a very narrow set of deep APIs make for the best programs. The other thing was indirection. Try avoiding it as much as possible. Languages which allow easy access to functions or lambdas or blocks being pass around, usually end up with 4 - 5 levels of function calls to get anything done. That makes things really complected together and makes it hard to reason about later.
  - loco5niner 2y ago
    and which book are you talking about?
    - RoyalSloth 2y ago
      Deep APIs were mentioned in "A Philosophy of Software Design" (John Ousterhout)
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
  A Philosophy of Software Design - John Ousterhout
thehappyfellow 2y ago

akkad33 2y ago

I read A philosophy of.. and I might as well be reading Philosophy because I didn't understand what the book was saying

microtonal 2y ago

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. I haven't read the original The Pragmatic Programmer, but picked up the 20th Anniversary Edition. Maybe it's because the original was so influential, but I didn't enjoy the 20th Anniversary Edition at all, it just full of boring platitudes.