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Books for Programmers

codingwizardry.com

38 pointsnickyvanurk15 comments

I can see someone proposed a title change to "Most hyped Books for Programmers"

The article title is "10 Best Books for Programmers in 2020" which isn't without sensationalism, however a simple change to "My 10 Best Books for Programmers in 2020" would make a huge difference for me.

I also feel that would be a better title. I've changed it :)

The pragmatic programmer is a particular take based on the experience of the authors. For example I think if you asked John Carmack about pragmatic programming he probably wouldn't spend a chapter on the importance of a knowing a text editor inside out because he has always used an IDE. Or the emphasis on using a scripting language and pipes etc to automate processing of text streams. Not a lot of that going on in game programming. Also, the authors tend to pontificate a bit which is fine but not what I would have thought to be primarily "pragmatic"

Designing data intensive applications is excellent. A rrall eye opener for me.

Is a low effort affiliate link list really at the top of HN right now?

Let me fix the title: "Most hyped Books for Programmers"

Hey, do you happen to have some lesser marketed books that you found being memorable and/or impactful for you?

The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles

for the Nand2Tetris course

I really enjoyed "Land of Lisp".

I don't code in Lisp for work, nor do I prefer it as a language, but it has some really deep ideas that are useful regardless of what you build and what tools you use.

Found Kernighan and Plauger's Elements of Programming Style useful - interesting to see how many of their comments on Fortran and PL/I code still remain very valid problems.

Their further book Software Tools in Pascal I found inspiring (along with SICP) as they show how you can build very powerful and useful tools from small modules slotted together - SICP showed me this in the extreme with chapter 2 ending with an implementation of a full numeric tower

I would bet on "structure and interpretation of computer programs".

You can read it online: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...

Oh and "The Art of Computer Programming" series by Donald Knuth

Or, "Buy a fridge from my affiliate link so I can make some cash"

Phoenix Project on that list is a big red flag.

whats the issue with phoenix project? i didn't like it personally but I'd be interested to know more about the general discourse

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