Ask HN: Best Programming Books of 2020?

38 points by gautamnarula 5 years ago | 10 comments

My company has a personal development/education budget and I still have some left over. Any good books that came out this year?

For reference, I'm a backend/ML engineer working primarily in Python but open to anything.

dllthomas 5 years ago |

There's a 2019 edition of The Pragmatic Programmer. I haven't read enough to compare it to the original.

muzani 5 years ago | |

Oh, nice catch! I'm reading The Pragmatic Programmer right now and I find myself wishing for an updated edition. I'm a little reluctant to buy a $40 patch of a book, but it almost seems worth it.

According to the preface, "As a result, this book is something of a Ship of Theseus. Roughly one-third of the topics in the book are brand new. Of the rest, the majority have been rewritten, either partially or totally. Our intent was to make things clearer, more relevant, and hopefully somewhat timeless."

It looks like it did get a substantial update.

mister_hn 5 years ago |

My favourite is about software engineering in general:

- Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time by Titus Winters

Another good one is "Real-World Cryptography" by David Wong

ApolloRising 5 years ago |

Practical Object-Oriented Design: An Agile Primer Using Ruby 2nd Edition by Metz Sandi (Author)

Starting to get into programming again and she explains things in a way even a non programmer can understand. Quite rare in programming books. One of my all time favorites.

hobabaObama 5 years ago | |

Thank you for this suggestion! I have started reading it on oreilly and really loving it.

If you have any other suggestions on Books and Courses, please do share...

ApolloRising 5 years ago | | |

Glad you enjoyed it. I'm enjoying this but it is not a book https://towardsdatascience.com

rramadass 5 years ago |

Not related to 2020 specifically; but you might find the ML/DL works of Timothy Masters (http://www.timothymasters.info) interesting. He has expertise in various domains and the code is all in C++.

Also i recently came to know of Markus Voelter (https://voelter.de/) and his works on DSLs. You might find his book DSL Engineering: Designing, Implementing and Using Domain-Specific Languages useful in coming up with DSL solutions for your ML/DL domain.

ivars 5 years ago |

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 4th edition (2020).

Jtsummers 5 years ago |

If there's enough, or you're willing to supplement it, and your employer doesn't already pay for it: https://learning.oreilly.com. I have made extensive use of this site since it was Safari Books Online (which was a better deal, you got download tokens and could get PDFs of the books or chapters).