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Comment by _vuqm | Hacker News Reader

A related question: Are there any programming books you wish were written?

My long term side project has been to bootstrap an independent publishing house focused on technical topics. I'm always looking to hear what programming books people think are missing in the market.

Some recurring topics I keep seeing are more books on the soft skills / career development side of things, and more project based books that help you learn how certain technologies work internally by building a database, queue system, web framework, etc. from scratch.

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Beautiful Code is a book that actually exists but I found disappointing in that the title describes a book that I'd like to see but I found most of the examples disappointing and not very beautiful. I'd love to see a book that lived up to the title better.

I'd like to see a good book on error handling. I feel this is still one of the great unsolved problems of software engineering (alongside naming) and most programming books just don't do it and say something like "obviously this is not production code but error handling would clutter up the examples too much". That to me is indicative of the problem.

I like the project based book idea. Physically Based Rendering is a rather nice example of this but I don't know of too many other similar books in other domains.

Maybe Programming Pearls achieves what Beautiful Code did not? Or Hackers Delight?

I think it's hard for code to be beautiful when it's mostly glue (calling libraries) rather than implementing a basic task (like sorting). As such, most modern (glue) languages are less likely to evoke aesthetic wonder in the reader than might a simpler, low level language like C or Pascal.

Programming Pearls is great (I haven't read Hacker's Delight) but it's mostly "programming in the small". I think it would be interesting to see a book that took real world projects and looked at some core piece of them that is particularly elegant or clever. The core of how git manages its data structure for example, or the Quake BSP. In practice most such real code is probably too tangled up with the rest of the project to be very suitable for this approach unfortunately.

I would love a project based book that tries to teach me the core principles and gives me some guidance and experience in building with a specific technology.

There are som fine guides online, but they usually don't have the scope or "budget" of a book. That being said, I loathe those massive 1500 page tomes that brand themselves as an "introduction" to the subject (I mean that first book in the linked article, "Introduction to Algorithms", 1300 pages), it really demotivates me when thinking about having to delve into those to learn the basics.

It would be nice with books in the 200-300 page range, and maybe doing project based books to teach the ropes and pitfalls of a technology would solve that. Then there's the possibility to make follow-ups with more intermediary topics or projects.

something like this? https://livebook.manning.com/#!/book/microservices-in-net-co...

I would like a Computer Science 102 book. I'm a self taught programmer and started learning through a couple CS 101 books (eg. John Guttag). Those 101 skills were enough for me to run an online business via python/django. However, I don't know what's next to make me a better programmer. I'm assuming learning algorithms is the next step, but I don't really know.

Computer science doesn't necessarily make you a better programmer. What programs do you want to get better at writing?

Looking to get better at building web apps. I just don’t know if there is a better way of structuring my code, making it more maintainable, more efficient. Sometimes when I look at my code from a year ago, I think it’s embarrassingly bad.

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