Ask HN: What are the best programming books you could read in a weekend?

24 points by jon_kuperman 8 years ago | 8 comments

I'm a big fan of books like Code Complete and SICP but they are huge and take a long time to get through. What are some books small enough to finish in a weekend that you've learned a lot from?

sharmi 8 years ago |

A Tour of Go [1] (If you are a novice, you really should try writing the programs yourself. You will end up finishing it in an day or two. If you just read through, it would be just a couple of hours)

The Little Schemer [2]

[1] https://tour.golang.org/welcome/1

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Little-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/0...

atsaloli 8 years ago |

"Understanding Software" by Max Kanat-Alexander

Book review: https://www.infoq.com/news/2017/10/understanding-software-re...

Release announcement:https://www.codesimplicity.com/post/understanding-software/

atsaloli 8 years ago | |

More on "Understanding Software" by Max Kanat-Alexander and how it helped me:

Thanks to this book, I've started re-factoring code before adding new features, our code base is getting a little better every day (more maintainable) which reversed a trend, it was getting harder to add features, now it is easier; plus when I design now, my designs are cleaner and result in maintainable code.

csnewb 8 years ago |

Debugging by David J. Agans. It's about 206 pages and the information is pretty high level, but it taught me to systematically debug problems instead of blindly changing random code.

t3h2mas 8 years ago |

- https://drboolean.gitbooks.io/mostly-adequate-guide-old/cont...

- https://leanpub.com/javascriptallongesix/read

hackermailman 8 years ago |

Some of the Little Schemer books you could do in 2-3days

There's a new one coming out on Dependent Types https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/little-typer

dreistdreist 8 years ago |

How fast can you read?

- Clean Code

- Code Complete 2

- The Pragmatic Programmer

- Professional PHP

- Effective Java

- Domain Driven Design Distilled

amarraja 8 years ago |

I read Programming Elixir in a weekend(ish) including doing most of the exercises. Was quite eye-opening to the world of functional concurrency.