Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read? Until now I've read: - The Healthy Programmer - Clean Code - Test-Driven Development by Example What should I add to my library? |
Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read? Until now I've read: - The Healthy Programmer - Clean Code - Test-Driven Development by Example What should I add to my library? |
* Pragmatic Programmer
* Code Complete
Dasgupta, Papadimitriou and Vazirani: "Algorithms" (McGraw Hill)
Kleinberg, Tardos: "Algorithm Design" (Pearson)
Yea, I know the code examples are written in C, but he goes into detail about how networks and ipc work.
Psychology of Programming
=========================
1. "Psychology of Computer Programming" - Gerald M. Weinberg
2. "Software Design – Cognitive Aspect" by Francoise Detienne
3. "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Kahneman and Tversky
4. "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates U" by Daniel Pink
Book 1 is a really nice read and touches a lot of the social and workplace aspects of computer programming. Book 2 is more focused on modern research of program comprehension in relation to cognition. It's a little older, and often just scratches the surface, but they both nicely show that a lot of social and psychological factors are relevant for programming, independent of the programming languages developers use. 3. and 4. add some more background infos to it if you want to dive deeper.
Career Development
==================
- "Hackers and Painters" - Paul Graham
- "The Passionate Programmer" - Chad Fowler
In addition to the Pragmatic Programmer which has been mentioned in other comments, these books really helped me understand where I wanted to be as a programmer.
Technology
==========
With a stronger focus on technology I recommend:
- "Language Implementation Patterns" - Terence Parr
- "A Retargetable C Compiler: Design and Implementation" - Hanson, Fraser
I found them more helpful than the Red Dragon Book. The latter is good, but as a beginner I felt a little lost and Terence Parr's book was much more helpful.
Practice & Karate
=================
- "Elegant Objects" by Yegor Bugayenko
- "Working Effectively With Legacy Code" - Michael Feathers
- "Growing OO Software, Guided by tests" - Pryce, Freeman
- "Test Driven Development" by Kent Beck
And, this last one I can't recommend enough:
"XUnit Test Patterns" by Gerard Meszaros
Kent Beck's TDD is good book to start with. Even if you feel like you have got testing figured out, you should try TDD. It has more to do with discipline and getting things done, rather than writing code fast or smart or efficiently. Someone I follow on twitter once called it "thinking at sustainable pace", which is really what TDD is about. A lot of people are simply offended by the idea to "test first". To me, "test first" is roughly equivalent to "think before you code". Maybe this is what others find offensive.
As for an advanced view on testing, Gerard Meszaros's book is really good. It is a catalogue of testing patterns that helps to structure testing code in a nice way.
Depending on OP's skill I would recommend the following: Be very carefull with the following books:
- Design Patterns - Gang of Four
- Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
- {Doing Anything with} Domain Driven Design
These books are really valuable, but somewhat problematic. Sometimes they will give you a hammer and make everything look like a nail. Sometimes they make it easy to focus on the wrong things. They come over as precise and clear, but really aren't, which will cause discussions and poor choices. On the surface, they sound nice, simple and friendly, but on a deeper level, they are really difficult to understand.
If you want to read them, I encourage you to do so with your colleague and discuss them critically. Maybe you can have a wednesday afternoon bookclub meeting at your company. We once did that for "Working Effectively with Legacy Code".
I collected some more suggestions on a trello board a while ago, which should be accessible here:
https://trello.com/b/lw96ei6d/books
If you wish to contribute, just let me know. Then initial collection started when we got together after an open space.
BTW: Thank you all for your suggestions! I will add some of your recommendations to the trello board.
Gonna have to pick that one up again and see what else I can glean from it years later :)
Basically, it's a collection of small fun loosely related chapters about various ideas in computer science. It's the kind of book where you can open it up in the middle and start reading.
Over the years, I must have purchased 5 or 6 copies because I keep giving them away.
JavaScript Allongé, the "Six" Edition by Reginald Braithwaite
Are Your Lights On? by Gerald M. Weinberg
Software Craftsmanship - The New Imperative, Pete McBreen
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1035377.Software_Craftsma...
From a blog post ( http://the-whiteboard.github.io/book/review/2016/02/17/five-... ) I wrote a bit ago...
---
The first thing that will come to mind when seeing that title is “ug, another book on patterns.” Or maybe “I thought it was named Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software”
This isn’t anything like that book. Or maybe it should be. The full title of the book is A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. Yes, this is a book about architecture - but not software architecture. It is about the houses and buildings that we walk live and work in.
The description of A Pattern Language is one that will sound very familiar to people familiar with Design Patterns:
> It is shown [in The Timeless Way of Building], that towns and buildings will not become alive, unless they are made by all the people in society, and unless these people share a common pattern language, within which to make these buildings, and unless this common pattern language is alive itself.
> In this book we present one possible pattern language, of the kind called for in The Timeless Way. This language is extremely practical. It is a language that we have distilled from our own building and planning efforts over the last eight years. You can use it to work with your neighbors, to improve your town and neighborhood. You can use it to design a house for yourself, with your family; or to work with other people to design an office or a workshop or a public building like a school. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction.
> The elements of this language are entities called patterns. Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice. This is the book that inspired Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vissides.
By reading A Pattern Language you will be able to understand what the authors of Design Patterns were trying to do and how design patterns were intended to work.
It’s a good book too, who knows what else you will find useful in it. Pattern #146 describes a flexible office space. Pattern #148 describes a workspace for small work groups, #151 is about small meeting rooms, #152 is a half private office. Everyone who works in today’s world of computers and cubes, can use these ideas to conceptualize and consider improvements to the office.
- Code complete
- Pragmatic programmer
- Design patterns
- Programming pearls
- If you're going for hardcore programming: the dragon book, something on modern hardware and something on OS internals.
Let Over Lambda forgot by whom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c Not technically a book, but watch it anyway.
Is that really language agnostic? I don't know how you could follow along with it without knowing some ML or Haskell.
I like /coding interview/ resources for this, because they skip the proofs and get to the point faster.
Cracking the coding interview is good So is interviewcake.com (disclosure: I made it)
Drift into Failure, by Sidney Dekker. Studies failure analysis in complex systems, and basically argues that our classic reductionist/scientific method approach is the wrong way to study complex engineering failures.
How Buildings Learn, by Stewart Brand. This isn't about programming. It's about architecture, in the build-a-building sense. It studies what happens to buildings over the course of their lives, as opposed to just when they're first built.
Enterprise Integration Patterns, by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf. Learn how to use message queues and service busses correctly. Honestly, just read the first couple of chapters (65 pages or so), and the rest is reference, to look up as needed, so it's not as imposing as it sounds.
Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, by W. Richard Stevens. This book was my bible back in the olden days before http and ssh and stuff (I'm olde). Knowing how sockets really work can be an absolute lifesaver, even in this modern world of giant protocol stacks. Especially in this modern world.
The Art of Computer Programming, vols 1-3, by Donald Knuth. Only a madman would actually read them all, but they're good to have to remind you that there are mountains you can't even begin to climb.
A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge. A science fiction novel that is really about hacking, set thousands of years in the future, when Moore's Law is long defeated and programmers are basically archeologists.
Design Patterns (aka Gang of Four), by Gamma/Helm/Johnson/Vlissides. There are lots of good books on design patterns, but you should really read the one that started it all. (For extra credit, read A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander - a book about urban architecture that inspired it.)
Continuous Delivery, by Jez Humble and David Farley. Stop thinking about your program in isolation, and learn how to deploy effectively!
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert Cialdini. This is DHH's favorite book. Learn how people think, and how to use that to design better products.
How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. Not creepy at all, despite how the title sounds in today's language. This book is the bible of how to get along with others. It's been in continuous print since before WWII, for good reason.
The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries. The best work you do is the work you find you don't need to do. Learn how to fail fast and save time on projects and product development, by building what customers want rather than what you think they need.
and take a look at this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13448818
- The Advent of the Algorithm ; Berlinski
- Engineering a Compiler ; Torczon and Cooper
- Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment ; Stevens and Rago
- Databases, Types, and the Relational Model ; Date
- Code ; Petzold
Refactoring
Patterns of enterprise architecture
Effective Java (2nd Edition) by Joshua Bloch. It's a Java book but it's language-agnostinc in a way. A great book.
A Pattern Language, Alexander and Ishikawa and Silverstein http://amzn.to/2s9aSSc
Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment , Stevens http://amzn.to/2qPOMjN
Algorithmics: the Spirit of Computing, Harel http://amzn.to/2rW5FNS
Applied Crytography, Wiley http://amzn.to/2rsULxS
Clean Code, Martin http://amzn.to/2sIOWtQ
Clean Coder, Martin http://amzn.to/2rWgbEP
Code Complete, McConnel http://amzn.to/2qSUIwE
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, Petzold http://amzn.to/2rWfR9d
Coders at Work, Seibel http://amzn.to/2qPCasZ
Compilers: Principles, Techniques, & Tools, Aho http://amzn.to/2rCSUVA
Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective, O'Hallaron and Bryant http://amzn.to/2qPY5jH
Data Flow Analysis: Theory and Practice, Khedker http://amzn.to/2qTnSvr
Dependency Injection in .NET, Seemann http://amzn.to/2rCz0tV
Domain Driven Design, Evans http://amzn.to/2sIGM4N
Fundamentals of Wireless Communication, Tse and Viswanath http://amzn.to/2rCTmTM
Genetic Programming: An Intrduction, Banzhaf http://amzn.to/2s9sdut
Head First Design Patterns, O'Reilly http://amzn.to/2rCISUB
Implementing Domain-Driven Design, Vernon http://amzn.to/2qQ2G5u
Intrduction to Algorithms, CLRS http://amzn.to/2qXmSBU
Introduction to General Systems Thinking, Weinberg http://amzn.to/2qTuGJw
Joy of Clojure, Fogus and Houser http://amzn.to/2qPL4qr
Let over Lambda, Hoyte http://amzn.to/2rWljcp
Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, Tanenbaum http://amzn.to/2rKudsw
Parsing Techniques, Grune and Jacobs http://amzn.to/2rKNXfn
Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, DeMarco and Lister http://amzn.to/2qTu86F
Programming Pearls, Bentley http://amzn.to/2sIRPe9
Software Process Design: Out of the Tar Pit, McGraw-Hill http://amzn.to/2rVX0v0
Software Runaways, Glass http://amzn.to/2qT2mHn
Sorting and Searching, Knuth http://amzn.to/2qQ4NWQ
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Abelson and Sussman http://amzn.to/2qTflsk
The Art of Unit Testing, Manning http://amzn.to/2rsERDu
The Art of Unix Programming, ESR http://amzn.to/2sIAXUZ
The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist, Brooks http://amzn.to/2rsPjev
The Effective Engineer, Lau http://amzn.to/2s9fY0X
The Elements of Style, Strunk and White http://amzn.to/2svB3Qz
The Healthy Programmer, Kutner http://amzn.to/2qQ2MtQ
The Linux Programming Interface, Kerrisk http://amzn.to/2rsF8Xi
The Mythical Man-Month, Brooks http://amzn.to/2rt0dAR
The Practice of Programming, Kernighan and Pike http://amzn.to/2qTje0C
The Pragmatic Programmer, Hunt and Thomas http://amzn.to/2s9dlvS
The Psychology of Computer Programming, Weinberg http://amzn.to/2rsPypy
Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques, Gray and Reuter http://amzn.to/
Types and Programming Languages, Pierce http://amzn.to/2qT2d6G
Understanding MySQL Internals, Pachev http://amzn.to/2svXuFo
Working Effectively with Legacy Code, Feathers http://amzn.to/2sIr09R
Zen of graphics programming, Abrash http://amzn.to/2rKIW6Q
the bible / unknown author
the new testament / various
If at first sight my may think that they are outdated and superficial, but you can't be more wrong.
I here assume your source code will be read by others; or by yourself after more than three months has passed.
If you want this sort of thing, read a well-respected publication's style guide (e.g., from the AP, NYT or Economist).
The concepts and terminology are absolutely invaluable to understand, but you can pick those up other ways.
"The underachievers manifesto" - a short book that does wonders for your mental health in a world that values productivity and superficial, short-sighted goals over everything else.
https://www.amazon.com/Underachievers-Manifesto-Accomplishin...
https://www.manning.com/books/dependency-injection-in-dot-ne...
Even if you never intend to program in D, I encourage you to read this book to get a different view on metaprogramming, memory safety, and concurrency.
Implementing Domain Driven Design by Vaughn Vernon
Clean Code by Robert Martin
I think you will find some code in all of the books but the ideas are applicable almost everywhere.
If you can, forget about the title and just read it; most of the good stuff in this book is less about objects and much more a fantastic seminar on programming in general.
I've seen the "dragon book" mentioned several times, and I think it (and similar books) are good if you really do plan to (re-)invent a real world, large scale, programming language. If you really just want to get a feel for what's going on under the hood, the language presented in Nand2Tetris is specifically designed to have the necessary complexity to cover most of the details, but not so many special cases that you end up "chasing dragons". And the course is modular enough that you can jump right in and just implement the compiler if you want.
Learning more and more about imperative programming, OOP, design patterns, etc is good, but branching out into declarative programming and the functional and logic paradigms will stretch your mind for the better.
The great thing, I think, about The Reasoned Schemer is that it tackles a complex topic with almost no prose. The whole book is basically one code example after another, in a Q/A style. "What does this do?" <allow you to think about it> "Here is what it does, and here's why." Rinse and repeat. I think more technical books should try this.
I like reading the classics of the field. Not only because they are classics, but also because they tend be well-written and hence more readable as well (than your average text). But maybe that is a tautology :) - they are classics because they are well-written ...
Update: Answering my own question - I saw here:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/reasoned-schemer
that it is part of a series, which includes the books I mentioned above.
- The Practice of Programming
- The Mythical Man Month
- The Cathedral and the Bazaar
- The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- Introduction to Algorithms
- Hackers and Painters
Some of these do contain mixed language code examples, but they are expressed in a way to be agnostic. A problem is a problem; in any language.
It's a nice fiction book that goes into how different people view the world. At least that's what I've gotten out of it so far, I'm only about a quarter of the way through it so I might be missing some of the things it covers.
IMO, It's more "philosophy" than "programming", but it makes you think about the role of technology in our lives and our role as creators of that technology.
A really well written short glimpse of things every programmer must know.
I would then look for language specific options as well, because programming for security can vary a lot amongst languages. Writing securely for native applications running on a system is much different than writing secure web apps.
I like the 4 simple rules, I think he originally got these from Kent Beck. It is easier to keep this system in your mind if it is just a few basic principles.
Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers
As others also mentioned this. I think this is becoming more important as people transition to new jobs where they have to take on existing software. Having a process to deal with code that lacks documentation and tests is really important.
https://www.amazon.com/Programmers-Work-Interviews-Computer-...
This book is from 1989, but it's a timeless and fascinating look at the minds of Bill Gates, Andy Hertzfeld (apple/mac), Dan Bricklin (visicalc), and 16 others.
Implementing Domain Driven Design
So - good book, but not for this purpose.
- Code Complete 2nd Ed.
- Quality Software Management Vol 1-4, by Gerald M. Weinberg
I'd also throw in: Code Reading - The Open Source Perspective
I started reading the book about a year into my first development job and it really brought to light the frustrations my users were having as I was seeing as it was just another interesting problem to me. As I said in my past post I haven't been diligent in reading it so I'm only a quarter of the way through but here's hoping I'll get more insights out of it when I pick it back up.
I do think that what this book talks about can be discovered in other ways, but for people who are just starting in the technology field it's a good primer to be aware of how others experience what you implement.
Even if you don't adopt formal methods in your day-to-day work (often we're not building sky-scrapers) it's a useful book to give you insight into the kinds of questions one should be asking and thinking about when designing software systems.
http://aosabook.org/en/index.html
Titles :
* The Architecture of Open Source Applications (volumes I and II)
* The Performance of Open Source Applications
* 500 lines or lessOne of the most influential programming books I've ever read. The code is in Java, but it's east to follow even for a non-Java developer, and the truths are universal. Learn the most fundamental design and encapsulation patterns. Uncle Bob Martin is a legend. This book has probably made me tens of thousands of dollars.
https://www.amazon.com/Software-Development-Principles-Patte...
https://www.amazon.com/Practice-Programming-Addison-Wesley-P...
Any language worth learning has this property of influencing the way you think forever. TDD, Code Complete &co are all very integrated into mainstream industry and are no longer novel. If you find yourself needing to recommend your colleagues to read Code Complete you might consider working on the skills to get a better job.
The Unix Programming Environment was published in 1984. I read it over 20 years later and was astonished at how well it had aged. For a technical book from the 80's, it is amazingly lucid and well-written. It pre-dates modern unix, so things have changed but much that goes unstated in newer books (for brevity) is explicit in UPE. (Plus, the history itself is illuminating.) It gave me a much deeper understanding of how programs actually run over computer hardware. Examples in C are old-school and take a bit of close reading but oh so rewarding. https://www.amazon.com/Unix-Programming-Environment-Prentice...
Mastering Algorithms in C. Another fantastically well-written book that shows (with practical examples) how to implement common algorithms. This is just such a great book! https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Algorithms-Techniques-Sorti...
Also:
Code (Petzold). This one is truly language-agnostic. Others have mentioned it already. Can't recommend enough if you're iffy on the internals of computers and programming. https://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softw...
Write Great Code (Volumes I and II). Randall Hyde's books are fantastic explications of the underlying computer operations. Examples are in assembly or pseudo-code but easy to understand. https://www.amazon.com/Write-Great-Code-Understanding-Machin...
-How to make friends and influence people. Anyone who works collaboratively with people needs to be able to communicate effectively.
-The Elements of style. Writing understandable code is similar to any other type of writing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Programming_St...
I swear I've had this book recommended to me at least a thousand times, I'm almost suspicious though I don't know that suspicious is the right word
It's not.
It was written in the 1930s, and has been continuously in print since then. How many books have achieved that honor? That's because it's one of the best books you will ever read. Absorbing its lessons will make you a better person.
Edit: Written in a question-answer style, it’s geared toward luring you into recursion and functional programming.
The algorithms are explained, and demonstrated (in java). But with the knowledge of how the algorithm works you should be able to use them in another language.
(And even though henrik_w already mentioned it, Code Complete2 is a really good book to read!)
Lot's good suggestions in this thread, here's one I didn't see:
"Software Runaways - lessons learned from massive software project failures," by Robert L. Glass.
After I complete this book, I think I'll read his other book: Crafting Interpreters. This one teaches about implementing a programming language from scratch, once in Java and a second time in C.
"Introduction to algorithms : a creative approach" by Udi Manber. ". Great book to learn algorithm design.
It's an old book but the most eye-opening one to me.
Still a worthy topic, still worth your time. As was mentioned about 'The Pragmatic Programmer', I think reading this works best once you have a few years of experience.
But programmers haven't changed much since then. You'll recognize all the weirdness in software work.
This is one of the few truly language agnostic books on programming. SICP is close, but it is limited in relevance at times due to the limitations of a particular language (Scheme).
"Algorithms and Data Structures" from Niklaus Wirth.
"Introduction to Algorithms, 3rd Edition" from Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, Clifford Stein.
"The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management" from Richard Jones and Antony Hosking
"Code Complete" from Steve McConnell
"From Mathematics to Generic Programming" from Alexander Stepanov and Daniel Rose
* "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" Martin Fowler (978-0201485677)
* "Computer Systems: A Programmers Perspective" Randal E. Bryant (978-0134092669)
Motulsky's Intuitive Biostatistics - this one goes over all the usual methods used in science from distributions to t-test to ANOVA to regressions etc., the basics, but doesn't introduce the maths (you use R for that) but the assumptions and pitfalls of all of those methods.
Statistics Done Wrong: The Woefully Complete Guide - this is all the stuff that's going wrong in applied statistics, a bit short but enlightening
Discovering Statistics Using R - a whopper of a book (~1000 pages?), it goes through everything while also being funny (the constant humor may not be for everyone). Graphs, correlations, regressions, all the MLMs and GLMs, linear models etc. pp., their assumptions, how to run them in R, how to interpret R's sometimes annoying output, etc. pp. Like Motulsky's, but wayyyyy more in-depth on the language's specifics.
Naked Statistics - an intro to stats for laypeople with a focus on politics/economics, good for interpreting and assessing daily news
Any examples of books focused on that? I can't think of any.
Robert C. Martin introduces the disciplines, techniques, tools, and practices of true software craftsmanship. This book is packed with practical advice–about everything from estimating and coding to refactoring and testing. It covers much more than technique: It is about attitude.
* "Compilers: Principles, Techniques, & Tools" by Aho et al. (i.e., "the dragon book")
* "Data Flow Analysis: Theory and Practice" by Khedker et al.
* "Understanding MySQL Internals" by Sasha Pachev.
* "Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques" by Gray and Reuter.
* "Fundamentals of Wireless Communication" by Tse and Viswanath.
* "Genetic Programming: An Intrduction" by Banzhaf et al.
* "Applied Crytography" by Schneier.
EDIT: A few additional comments:
(1) Although these books are problem-domain specific, some of them had benefits outside of their problem domains:
* The Dataflow book has some great coverage of fixpoint algorithms. It's really helpful to recognize when some problems are best solved by fixpoint analysis.
* The "dragon book" takes a lot of the mystery out of compilers. That's somewhat helpful when writing code that needs to be fast. It's super helpful if you want to work with compiler-related technologies such as LLVM.
* Understanding the fundamental challenges of transaction processing helps you avoid massive misadventures when dealing with databases or concurrent / multithreaded systems.
(2) YMMV, but I've found it hard to soldier through these books unless I had a need to for my job or for school.
For a good intro of modern back end development, check out Engineering a Compiler. It's also got the lexical and parsing end of things, but a bit better done, but still quite theoretical.
One of the best books I read on programming is "Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming"; it's not strictly speaking language agnostic, based as it is on Oz, but Oz isn't a language you'd ever use in production and is a reasonable base to introduce you to ways of programming that will probably be completely unfamiliar, like constraint programming, dataflow, concurrent logic, etc.
As someone who has quite a few books on compilers, program analysis, type theory, etc... I find the Dragon book an irreplaceable reference to this day. It has a breadth of content shared by very few other books. For instance, Muchnick's classic "Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation" is really good for analysis and optimization but neglects all front end topics. The only area where I believe the Dragon book is inadequate in is type theory (I recommend Types and Programming languages [TAPL] by Pierce and Semantics with Application by Nielson for a gentler intro).
As to parsing, its chapter on parsing (4) is not as "hip" has some people want. However, it is solid and will teach you how to do parsing. There are newer and fancier techniques not covered in Chapter 4 but in general most people would benefit just having a solid understanding of recursive descent parsing!
Most programmers don't understand parsing worth a crap, imho. Some compiler theory would do most of us some good. I read it because I was doing data stream parsing back in the olden days before XML (which was before JSON), when we had to write our own stream formats. It really changed my whole way of thinking about a fundamental class of programming problems.
If you want more resources on Compilers other than books, such as tutorials, guides, talks and papers, then go ahead and check the Awesome Compilers vertical I compiled a while ago: https://github.com/aalhour/awesome-compilers
Cheers!
One of the more famous compiler writers from that era once told me that the Dragon book's original codegen section wasn't even historically how anyone wrote a compiler and it certainly didn't reflect modern practice even back in the 90s.
However, the update significantly improves it with the addition of Monica Lam's contribution. I don't know if it's state of the art for codegen (probably not), but I'm not sure what book is (Muchnick is great too, but this is also quite old now).
Applied Cryptography was an important political statement that we can and should have access to cryptographic technology, but I don't think it can be recommended as an appropriate introduction to the field in 2017.
Also, Donald Knuth's "The Art of Programming" (at least the fundamental and sorting/searching algorithms books), plus a book about graph theory and algorithms.
It's definitely a good idea to have prior general knowledge of database internals before reading an "internals" book.
I'm not sure if it's out of date, but my favorite book on the topic was "Database System Implementation" by Garcia-Molina et al. I found it to be super-readable.
What I like about the "internals" book is you get to see a real, specific database up close, warts and all. It gives you a different perspective from an overview book like the one mentioned above.
Additionally, I don't see how the need to know about the internals of MySQL means one should use a better database. PostgreSQL is normally proposed as the better alternative to MySQL if one sticks to Open Source, and all the good experts at it I have met were familiar with its internals too.
An equivalent substitution for another database would be fine; anyone have any suggestions? Then again, such a substitution is really solving a non-problem.
2004 is old now? Really?
Honestly, good books don't age as long as their core domain stays valid. Structurally C++ is pretty much the same as when the book came out.
And Fred Brookes' book is over 30 and sadly just as relevant.
That statement alone, one of the sections of the book, recommending you to allow the compiler to find your errors for you, is an example of the "age" of the book.
At the time I read it, when it first came out, I loved it. I still love Michael's work and advice to this day, but this book was written for another time.
Definitely the best book I've read on programming.
I'd also recommend The Linux Programming Interface by Michael Kerrisk as it teaches so much about what makes modern Unix what it is but.. it's arguably quite oriented around C by necessity. It's not a "C book" by any means though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Bentley_(computer_scientis...
It's about software engineering but also about hardware and some different kinds of design outside of IT.
From an interview about the book [2]:
> Eoin: Your new book does talk about software design in places, but it’s really about design generally, and the case studies span buildings, organizations, hardware and software. Who is the book aimed at? Are you still writing primarily for people who design software or are you writing for a broader audience?
> Fred: Definitely for a broader audience. I have been surprised that The Mythical Man-Month, aimed at software engineers, seems to have resonated with a broader audience. Even doctors and lawyers find it speaks to some of their team problems. So I aimed this one more broadly.
Brooks is also the author of The Mythical Man-Month which is often mentioned on HN.
[1]: http://www.informit.com/store/design-of-design-essays-from-a...
[2]: http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1600886
- Code Complete by Steve McConnell
- The Effective Engineer by Edmond Lau
- The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
If you don’t know much about hardware (and maybe even if you do) it’ll change the way you think about computing devices.
- Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment by Stevens
- Operating Systems: Design and Implementation by Tanenbaum
- The Art of Unix Programming by ESR
- Parsing Techniques by Grune and Jacobs
- Applied Cryptography by SchneierYes. TAOUP has a lot of good content about Unix programming styles and traditions, much of it useful generally. ESR's writing style is a bit heavy / verbose / uses verbal flourishes, but if you can let that not put you off, the book is worth reading. I've read most of it. One of the good sections is about Rules (of programming in Unix, which are not really rules, of course, but informal guidelines developed over many years of experience by many people - ESR has sort of codified them, a thing he tends to do a lot :)
The Rule about separating the interface from the implementation is a good one. I've seen developers at even enterprise companies sometimes not follow it in practice.
> - Parsing Techniques by Grune and Jacobs
Just saw that there is a new edition of this book:
*but be aware that he's a polarizing figure and opinions of his merits differ
(and if you happen to have a differing opinion, please use the reply button instead of the downvote button)
- Excellent book that gets into the internals of what developers need to know about SQL and covers each part as it relates to the 4 major SQL databases (Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, MySQL)
- Also has an online version: http://use-the-index-luke.com/sql/table-of-contents
The Code Book - Simon Singh
- It's just a good read that covers cryptography and message hiding throughout history. Probably a solid book for somebody around high school age.
'Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering', Robert Glass. Glass presents a list of things everybody knows, or ought to know, and gives both academic and opinionated support and/or critique for why they are and aren't so.
'Making Software', Oram and Wilson. An edited collection of papers on evidence-based software engineering.
'The Deadline', Tom DeMarco. A thinly disguised commercial for his advice on how to organize software development teams and organizations, packaged as light, light novel.
Unless you have some understanding of your system's architecture, how it's run in production, and why a production environment is Really Different and a Big Freaking Deal, and how operations is supposed to look like, you'll never be an effective programmer, no matter whether you run your own operations in a small start-up or work for a large enterprise with dedicated operations teams.
Abstract:
``` Complexity is the single major difficulty in the successful development of large-scale software systems. Following Brooks we distinguish accidental from essential difficulty, but disagree with his premise that most complexity remaining in contemporary systems is essential. We identify common causes of complexity and discuss general approaches which can be taken to eliminate them where they are accidental in nature. To make things more concrete we then give an outline for a potential complexity-minimizing approach based on functional programming and Codd’s relational model of data. ```
I have attempted some of the problems in Lua, Python, Erlang and Ada. It is very doable. So not just for Scheme.
But when I finally opened it up, wow. You can appreciate just how dense the information is. It really reads as if no sentence was written without some purpose of conveying information. Definitely go slow reading this series so you can properly ingest what's written.
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/books/ThinkingRecurs...
I'd venture that besides recursion, the other key concepts in programming have been pointers and first-class functions. Getting a grasp on these 3 ideas has been essential to learning.
Great short book to get you thinking creatively and how to dissect algorithmic problems, language agnostic with pseudocode examples.
Non-programming but still highly relevant for a professional programmer: Mythical Man Month, and Peopleware.
It's a collection of programming exercises I used when I taught introduction to programming. They start out incredibly trivial, ("prompt for a name, print "hello [name]" back to the screen. But the trivial part is, in my opinion, the fun part when you work with a new language.
That program is a two line program in Ruby. But it might be much more complicated if you implemented that as your first GUI app in Swift for iOS.
I wrote the book to teach beginners, but I and others use those exercises to learn new languages. The book has no answers, just the problem statements.
http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/
Teaches you to think simple and elegant.
I had very rose-tinted nostalgic memories. They did not hold up.
"How to Design Programmes" is a much better book. (But made for rank beginners.) And for the more advanced, "Types and Programming Languages".
See "Why Calculating is better than Scheming" (https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/wadler87....) for a critique.
Don't get me wrong, SICP is still a good book to have read. Just no longer my favourite.
Link?
I do not mean this as empty snark; it is something you can see across the board in programming language evolution. It is virtually impossible to propose a new general-purpose programming language today that does not have closure support, which is the biggest thing you're finding missing from C and Java to use the techniques in SICP. (It is not the only thing, but it is the biggest thing.) You'll note Java is going to bolt them on soon, or recently bolted them on, but it'll be another decade before Java is using them fluently either way.
I've often recommend SICP to self-taught programmers; it is not a complete substitute for a computer science education, but it is a concentrated dose of the stuff you're probably missing out on. Expect it to be the work of some months to work through it. However, in the end, a self-taught programmer who has also worked through SICP systematically and carefully is probably a better programmer than 80% of the modern computer science graduates nowadays. (If you want to avoid that fate, oh ye who are still in school, take the freaking compilers course at the very least. Do your peers complain that it is hard? Then maybe it is a good one.)
IMO, you're supposed to write your own Scheme to reap full benefits from SICP.
The book contains a recipe for an interpreter that can be transferred to any other language. Chapter 5.4 : The explicit-control evaluator[0].
Strangely this fact is not advertised that much, I find it to be one of the coollest features of the book.
The implementation is not a direct syntax translation - one needs to figure out how to implement the base susbstrate and how to handle e.g. tokenization, but well rounded software engineer should have some model in ones head how to manage these (so if there are missing pieces this is a good opportunity to brush on those).
[0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-34.htm...
It took me a while to understand that, if you’ve been raised on Java or C, these things are not obvious at all.
While it certainly espouses a functional style, I found the greatest lesssons to be higher level, focusing on abstraction.
Though I have limited knowledge of C and Java so would be keen to hear your elaborated thoughts on this.
It has good parts. But it has some very bad parts too, when it reinforces myths that, IMO, are very wrong (e.g.: cone of uncertainty, X times better programmer, etc).
I'd recommend to read it with care.
> - The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
After many years I still read parts of it, again and again. And I still like it.
It covers some really foundational concepts like idempotency which programmers don't often think about when architecting systems.
IMHO, MySQL is especially ugly due to an attempt to insert an abstract interface around its storage engines. IIRC that interface is leaky, and its documentation is pretty spotty. Also, the InnoDB storage engine has a lot of complexity that seemingly duplicates what's provided on the storage-engine-agnostic side of that interface.
One of the big lessons I took away from studying MySQL's internals, and partially confirmed by the "internals" book, was this: Be careful when designing a plugible storage-engines framework for a DBMS; MySQL has some examples of what can go wrong.
That's something you're unlikely to find mentioned in a generic DBMS-implementation book, but is very good to know about regardless.
'Essentials of Programming Languages' and 'Types and Programming Languages' are good choices. (But slightly off-topic for this particular subthread, since they don't deal with parsing.)
Try "Parsing Techniques: A Practical Guide" and then a more concise book like Muchnick.
Being familiar with the Chomsky Hierarchy ([1]), and the kinds of language recognizers required for each level in that hierarchy, can save parser authors a lot of wasted time.
E.g., "regex's can't count!"
I'd say the 'Head First' books are modern equivalents with a similar spirit.
Wrote many for XML/json based configs.
I think your last sentence is what caused me to misinterpret you. I agree with your comment up to "... being a good database.", but I think the point at which you need to know the internals of MySQL are irrelevant to whether you should use a database that is better for the problem you're trying to solve or not.
And also it seems to be something lots of programmers don't realize for some reason - many times I had to instruct people to crank up their compiler warning settings and actually read them. Especially in C-land, I can't count the number of times I solved someone's problem by appending -Wall to the gcc invocation and telling them to come back after they fixed all the warnings...
The IDE space has improved a lot since 2004, eg. Jetbrains' tools around refactoring and code cleanup suggestions, make things super simple.
Don't get me wrong, I've read this book, multiple times, it's on my bookshelf and think it's a great book, but it was written when the state of development was a much different landscape, IMO.
TAoUP is a good book on the Unix Philosophy, but it's worth noting that the ultimate expression of these ideas (Plan 9) was a failure, and the 'everything is a file' metaphor is arguably incorrect. I hope I didn't give the impression that it was not worth reading, especially in the sense that there are few other good sources for that information (even using Unix is not likely to teach you much about its whys and wherefores). I just think that it should be read in the proper context, and that recommendations should try to include that context.
And I'd bet that a lot of programmers wouldn't be working on and with Linux right now if they hadn't have read that book long ago.
Both of them changed my career path from Dos/Windows to Linux
Also, as a beginner, you don't want both the difficulties of contepts _and_ the difficulties of language to combine to stop you from learning as effectively.
>Also, as a beginner, you don't want both the difficulties of contepts _and_ the difficulties of language to combine to stop you from learning as effectively.
Are you referring to the need to learn Scheme to work through SICP? While the asker specifically requested language-agnostic books, Scheme was chosen as a language for SICP for being a "syntax-free" language...
That's not particularly demanding requirement. The class began with a single lecture about how Scheme worked and after that Hal and Gerry assumed you knew all the language you needed to and dove in.
When the course was introduced (early 80s), most incoming MIT freshman had not programmed a computer (!), including those who planned to do course 6 (EE or CS -- 6.001 was a requirement for either degree).
First-class functions, lambdas, closures, lexical scoping, etc. Abelson wrote, for instance:
"6.001 differs from typical introductory computer science subjects in using Scheme (a block-structured dialect of Lisp) rather than Pascal as its programming vehicle. The subject's developers feel strongly that Pascal is hopelessly constraining, and that important ideas (such as functional programming and object-oriented programming) can be addressed within Pascal only awkwardly, if at all."
no, i'm referring to the fact that this book isn't language agnostic (i.e., you wouldn't want to use anything other than scheme/lisp).
It was written for a different type of developer and a different type of development environment and a specific language, C++.
You haven't looked at C++ lately if you think it's the same as it was in 2004. The ISO has released new versions of the language in 2011, 2014 and ratified a new standard here in 2017. If you're writing C++ code that is consistent with 2004 C++ then you're writing a really bad version of "C with classes", not C++.
Edit:
Modern C++ contains native support for the filesystem, threads, lambda expressions, variants, upcoming networking library, coroutines (at least in Visual Studio), no more new/delete memory management, parallel algorithms and a ton more. This is a completely different language now and the code you write looks nothing like 2004 C++ code.
Just about all of these things were around in 2004.
"If you're writing C++ code that is consistent with 2004 C++ then you're writing a really bad version of "C with classes", not C++."
I applaud your attempt at an authoritative voice. But you focus on mostly technical trivia that are thin scaffolding on top of the language. I agree modern C++ is nice but it's the same language still.
"This is a completely different language now and the code you write looks nothing like 2004 C++ code."
Are you trolling? This reads like a transcript from a TV commercial.
> I agree modern C++ is nice but it's the same language still.
Well...in the same sense that any language is the same language after you add a bunch of things to it that weren't there before and shift to using those new features as idiomatic parts of the language. I would expect C++ written in 2004 to use different patterns than C++ written in 2017. Not "completely different"...but different.
Any other general-purpose language you'd be inclined to pick up right now would be fine.
IIRC, you end up implementing a scheme, which you can do nearly in the language of your choice, then the book covers that language you are implementing.
Had it been optional, I would have been sorely tempted to skip it. But, taking it was probably good for me in the long run :)
https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/ch1-Z-G-1.gif
Etc.
I would say generally C++ style has evolved through last decades with people understanding class based architecture as an antipattern and data pipelines based on preferably immutable data as the more robust and understandable approach. This has nothing to do with language standards or 'idiomatic' constructs - both can be expressed as perfectly elegant C++, using the '98 or '11 or '17 variant.
But anyway, within this context - refactoring old code - I would not expect a legacy codebase to resemble 2017 C++ as much as 1997 C++. This is the main reason I find the claim of methods to understand circa 2004 C++ to be outdated to be silly.
That's never been the way that I've read it, and it's not how I meant it. New language constructs allow for more-natural ways for the code to express the intent of the programmer, replacing the use of older constructs in the places that they were clumsy.
The entire point is to make the language more practical. Patterns of use in a language aren't idiomatic because of dogma (or at least, they shouldn't be). They're idiomatic because they're a clear and elegant way (or at least the most elegant way available) to implement something.
> I would not expect a legacy codebase to resemble 2017 C++ as much as 1997 C++.
Agreed, but then we come back to the fact that we might refactor a 1997 codebase differently in 2004 than in 2017.
Well, if the original code is of the worst kind of a mess, Feather's circa 2004 collection of methods to make it more understandable but functionally the same work just fine for the first part of the refactoring. In my experience this is the most difficult part as well. To what dialect of the language the code is ported after it is understandable, is a relatively trivial syntax transform after this.
I speak from experience from having recently had to implement features to a production codebase with millions of lines of code, some of which date back to Fortran, and that took the final step of evolving into C++ sometimes in the late 90's.
I prefer the definition of legacy code that it's any code that does not have unit tests. In this case every transformation to a production codebase needs to retain the original behavior - without exact understanding what that behavior is.
I think this comment should have been my original response to this thread instead of the relatively cheeky responses I wrote earlier.
