Ask HN: What books have most influenced your coding style? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What books have most influenced your coding style?

10 pointsdavikr10 comments

Like @JohnFen said, my style has also evolved over multiple decades and it's hard to pin it down to one (or even a few) specific titles. But I suppose Teach Yourself C by Herbert Schildt deserves a nod, as it's basically the book I first learnt programming from.

Other than that, I can recall being influenced by a number of the X: How To Program[1] books by Deitel and Deitel. I might also mention Rapid Development and Code Complete by Steve McConnell. And The Pragmatic Programmer had some influence.

[1]: including "C: How to Program", "C++: How to Program" and "Java: How to Program".

I remember finding much of value in "Code Complete" by Steve McConnell, though it was long enough ago that I cannot recall specifics.

My coding style has evolved over the decades and I can't honestly say that any book had a major influence over what it is today.

But, early in my career, the book that was most influential to my style was the K&R, mostly because it corrected bad style habits I had learned from languages before I learned C.

https://linux.die.net/man/1/indent

I remember reading through it and deciding options based on what I’ve seen elsewhere. Later I just wrote in the chosen style without re-indent(1)ing whole files, cause this is generally a bad idea in my book.

The only change I made in around last ten years was using “}\nelse {“ because I realized that I’m post-newlining the preceding block anyway for visibility and “\n\n} else {“ looks kinda ugly.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Martin Kleppmann (O'Reilly 2017)

The Pragmatic Programmer, Andrew Hunt, David Thomas (1999)

Gwynne's Latin, N. M. Gwynne (2015)

> Gwynne's Latin

Would you kindly share how it influenced you. I am really interested in the intersection of human languages and programming languages.

Have you explored Sanscrit, with a similar lens as a programmer?

After reading Uncle Bob's bible many years ago, I thought about it as the sacred script, and tried to follow it to the t. During the next couple of years I learned that many of its advises need to be taken with a varying amount of salt - though I think that book can be still recognized in most of my work, if at least in parts.

'A Philosophy of Software Design' by John Ousterhout

Probably has had the most impact on my general naming and structuring. Just some really great advice in a sub 300 page book.

The Pasta Codex: 1001 Recipes

Reply on news.ycombinator.com