10 Books that Changed my Career as a Software Engineer | Hacker News Reader

10 Books that Changed my Career as a Software Engineer

storyforj.com

11 pointsparris7 comments

First of all, it seems the author has worked hard to make this site user-hostile. It's a mess of pointless animations that break selection and copying, where just text and images would suffice.

The book descriptions themselves are very short and don't say much what the books are about. The "or something similar" part in the page about "JavaScript the Good Parts" is particularly egregious - "find some book that ould make you really focus on language semantics, hell if I know which one". This is then one-upped by literally three sentences about a medium post later.

Can't really say much about the quality of the books themselves as I didn't read any of these, but I think this list would be more useful if the author spent more time thinking what to write about them, instead of making a flashy site.

There are 3 books on software development in Javascript. I view JS as an inferior language, not just for semantics, but because it's origins are troublesome for me. JS started as a language to provide interactivity to web pages. Contrast that to C#, which started as a general purpose language with serious minds working on it.

Is it worth reading JS based software engineering / design books, as compared to Code Complete or The Pragmatic Programmer?

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/javascript-the-good/978...

^ Speaks directly to your viewpoint.

That book is over a decade old now. Javascript and best practices have changed so much since then I don't think it is much help.

I don't think it's worth reading the JS books in your case actually. I think I was also trying to talk about the different types of tech books I've seen; meanwhile, also talk about the books that directly impacted me. I'd recommend books focused on C# that cause you to really deep dive into the language or ones that flip the language semantics on their head a bit. It's always great to see other paradigms and what you can pull from them.

I would know less after reading these books than before. And know more after forgetting them.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

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