Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer? I'm a recent grad looking to keep improving. I've read Clean Code, Game Programming Patterns, and Architecture Patterns with Python, and I feel I learned / improved a lot from each of them.
I was looking at Coding Horror's book recommendation list: https://blog.codinghorror.com/recommended-reading-for-developers/
but all those books seem very out of date.
Any suggestions for best books for software engineers in 2024? |
Surrounded by Idiots
Meditations
Related to this book is what we call "vertical feature slicing". (I'd be curious to know what other books cover this topic.) There are some Youtube videos on the topic. There was a great 2-hour video from 20 years ago that influenced me. Unfortunately, I don't remember the title and cannot find it today.
The video "Simple Made Easy" had a profound influence on my programming: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/
It takes time for them. It takes time for us. The small details are ironed out along the way but the big picture, the concept, is defined/designed before.
Note that I really like the books listed up to now, they are not "dependency injection in Typescript using framework x, y or z" kind of books, more general philosophy of coding (with people). Going to this upper level is for me where you go from good to great. And myself, going to my 50s, I am still learning...
That being said, these have been my favorites:
- designing data intensive applications (a great way of understanding systems + the basics of SRE)
- the senior engineer (I love the prototyping process he lays out)
- the effective engineer (lots of good gems for approaching prioritization)
- debugging (by David agans)- a great resource for a formalized debugging process if you don’t have one
- on writing well (I’m halfway through this, but it has been indispensable for writing tickets + messages at work)
I have no affiliation.
I read this years ago and regularly recommend it, especially when people are all over talking about some special queue or database technology. I find so many people don’t understand even how databases work and it’s crucial to application performance and structuring. Adding queues works to relieve server load but if you get swamped by messages you need to make an active decision on how to handle that - and maybe a queue isn’t the best idea if you can’t lose them.
Another one I found very helpful is Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann.
1. The Practice of Programming 2. Programming Pearls 3. Go Programming Language 4. Architecture of Open Source applications - https://aosabook.org/en/
I'm getting an eerie sense of Deja Vu.
I remember reading this exact thread (exact question, exact replies) a few days ago.
But right now it says this question was posted just 6 hours ago (right now the time is 2:35 pm 1st September UTC).
Either I'm going crazy or there's a bug with the time here.
@dang please tell me that I'm not going crazy, or at least that it's just a simple glitch in the matrix.
I've always done well following Don Lancaster's advice: Hit the basics, HARD.
Most modern software "innovations" are really just a restatement of David Parnas' paper from 1971. He suggested programs should be split up so that the data used by modules can't be affected by the other modules. "Data hiding."
Once you get a grounding in the history and literature of programming (which all other professions do without thinking), you'll start to see the "sameness" among all the supposed difference. Once you see the "sameness", you'll know what is truly important to know/master, and what is not.
As a recent grad, I'll tell you that the first thing I learned was to ignore all the "software engineering" stuff that schools teach. The reality is that I would be asked, "Build a tool to do X". So I'd start through the process, building a design and the data flows, starting to build the code. Then I'd get "It also has to do Y." And I'd have to throw away most of what was written.
Eventually, I learned the two rules Ken Thompson taught:
1) give users something useful in two week, not the whole problem solved. 2) when in doubt, use brute force.
That's it. With attention to fundamentals, you can clearly see that "Agile" is just a bunch of fancy words (and vendors selling tools) telling you to do that same thing. Only Ken talked about that in the 70's.
What you'll find is that getting a tool into the hands of users will generate new features based on what it already does. No more blue-sky wishes. And it will allow the tool to evolve into what they really want it to do. Which no one ever knows when they start. All the best software followed that path to greatness. (Which you'll see when you read the history of your chosen profession.)
So learn the history. Learn how computers work (not the "Von Neumann" stuff). Get a computer engineering book and learn about bit-slicing and clocks and microcode. It doesn't matter that you're not a hardware guy; you need to know what your code is actually doing, down on the metal.
Never stop learning. Read constantly. Read books you'll never find a job with, like SICP. (I once had to write a loop in a language without a loop construct. But I had read SICP, so I knew if it supported recursion, I could make a loop. And I did.) Don't read trash. Don't bother with the "current hotness"; if it's good, it's probably just a restatement of the old and if it's bad, it'll go away.
I'll just leave with an ancient aphorism: 40 can't tell 20. There's just a gap between what an older person has learned about the world, and what a younger person imagines the world to be. That different can be called "experience", but the fact is I remember perfectly the pearls of wisdom dropped on my by the "old men"...and 20 years later, I was them. So I offer this small essay, knowing it'll probably be rejected, but hoping that just this once it does some good for someone.
I think the most important chapter is on Simplicity of your build and code.
Definitely worth a read
He used it quite a few times in the beginning of the book.
"Obviously" is used for two reasons. Derision, or to escape criticism.
I'm obviously right.
Now the real critique. The book assumes experts are on hand to ask, and that terms don't change. I worked at a place where what we called user changed 3 times in 4 years. Runners/workers/producers. You would know when a bit of code was written based on the names for users in the api.
It also assumes that all experts agree. I worked on an education app where teachers in schools were the experts. Different schools in the same city had different terms for the same thing. So which expert do you trust.
Is it a trunk or a boot? Is it an elevator or a lift? And that's if you're writing an app for english only speaking experts.
Finally, we have to understand the mind of the dev, to know how they organised their walls. The dev that left the company 5 years ago.
DDD requires a certain discipline and dedication I just haven't seen in my career across many companies.
Good luck getting more than a handful of people to not only digest the big books but also structure all their code and company around practicing it.
It is quite concise (about 190 pages), but in my opinion, it includes all the essential information that the other books in that category would teach you. It leaves out a lot of cruft that over the years turned out to be non-issues (code styling, problems that come with object oriented programming, etc.) but occasionally - when the topic is popular and widespread (e.g. Uncle Bob advice) - addresses them as alternative opinions. It was first published in 2018 and is therefore not in the out-of-date category.
So I would recommend it as essential read, hands down.
If you want something a bit more elaborate: "The Pragmatic Programmer" has a 20th Anniversary Edition. It is a timeless classic, worth reading at any rate.
That being said, I wish there was a single consistent resource[1] that summarizes truly modern software design philosophy in the sense that it leaves the object orientation inspired ideas behind that did not turn out to be useful and focusses on typed functional programming. Maybe with examples in Typescript and Rust.
[1] Possibly a book, but not necessarily. For me it would be important that it presents a consistent opinion, so it should be from a single author or small group of authors. The information I have in mind is mostly there, but spread out over many blog posts from people with slightly different takes and ideas about them. The overwhelming majority of recommendations in this thread are from authors I'd consider part of the founding generation. I'd love to read about software design from the perspective of a younger generation.
Maybe the only book that has actual made me a better programmer that I can objectively measure.
Not Rust or TS, but i found Java to Kotlin a decent book which provides refactoring of java OOP to more functional patterns. One of the authors Nat Pryce was big into OOP design and was also a co-author of famous book Growing Object Oriented Software by Tests.
I haven't read the original The Pragmatic Programmer, but picked up the 20th Anniversary Edition. Maybe it's because the original was so influential, but I didn't enjoy the 20th Anniversary Edition at all, it just full of boring platitudes.
1. A Philosophy of Software Design is very good. Not the whole of it but it’s short and to the point.
2. Fiction, as diverse as possible. I apologise for making assumptions but many software engineers are secretly lacking in understanding other people, what kind of of life experiences that have, how they think about the world, what is important for them. If you work with people it is going to be useful.
Also, it’ll enrich your life and you’ll have more to talk about during coffee breaks :)
I mostly read Fantasy books and a little bit of SF, but the main points I would say is better visualization. Reading textbooks gives you understanding, but being able to reconstruct scenes and characters just from a few lines is a nice plus. When reading story from a ticket, it's become much easier to visualize a concrete use case. Also empathy building. Manuals and documentation are very dry and text is more constrained bandwidth-wise than visual interactions. Reading fiction can help you interact better through text emotionally. And we respond better to stories than logical arguments.`
I wish there were a lot more non-fiction books dealing with common and uncommon life's situations, which step out of the theory towards what actually happens in practice.
If you're interested in performance, you can read https://algorithmica.org/ and https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf
The first are books like Pragmatic Programmer, Mythical Man Month, Code Complete, Design Patterns, talks by Alan Kay on software systems and OOP, even Game Engine Architecture etc. A lot of the content there is distilled experience which is much faster to learn from a book than gain the hard way on the job.
The other books are practical deep dives. Here I would recommend a variety of books like Inside the Machine by Stokes, Computer Architecture by Hennessy, 21st Century C by Klemens, Crafting Interpreters by Nystrom, Compilers by Aho, Effective Java, Nature of Code by Shiffman, Ray Tracing Challenge by Buck, Hands on Hacking by Hickey, and others, depending on your interest and area of focus.
So there's the philosophy of the craft which are mostly the core skills of software engineering (or engineering in general). Problem solving, project planning, resources planning, methodologies,... Then the various theories (computer science). Algorithms, Data Structures, Computer organization, Networking, Databases, Operating Systems,... And then the skills. Programming Languages, Libraries, Tools (editors, shells, build systems, debuggers, test runners). Being a good programmer involves being fairly knowledgeable in all three.
EDIT: An old book (also received an update) I'd add is The Psychology of Computer Programming by Weinberg. More descriptive than prescriptive compared to many other books, written in and about the same period as The Mythical Man-Month.
Here some other recomendations
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications - Tidy First?: A Personal Exercise in Empirical Software Design - A Philosophy of Software Design - Refactoring UI - The Software Engineer's Guidebook - https://blog.rstankov.com/programing-books/
I also have a personal recommendation for when you want to better understand testing, QA, or want to/have to work with QA people. [2]
[1] https://pragprog.com/titles/tpp20/the-pragmatic-programmer-2... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Lessons-Learned-Software-Testing-Cont...
- A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout - Domain-driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software by Eric Evans
They both manage to explain some ideas that are really important, in a very simple way (which makes me feel like an idiot).
For a good understanding of the basics of architecture: https://www.amazon.com/Web-Application-Architecture-Principl...
https://www.brendangregg.com/systems-performance-2nd-edition...
and
BPF Performance Tools
https://www.brendangregg.com/bpf-performance-tools-book.html
Programming Pearls too would still be worth reading
You’ll just get angry when writing it. We had written down solutions to problems with teams and offices in 50 years ago but just refused to follow them.
Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD5NrevFtbU
I also watched clean code videos and used it in practice, and why it _felt_ right my code size blew up and actually it got harder to understand by other people instead of easier.
Nowdays my main guidelines are getting a balance between less lines of code (while still readable), readable variable names and better performance.
Also I may get hate here for it, but I learned a lot from watching George Hotz programming tinygrad (available on YouTube).
“Old” but amazingly relevant today.
https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Engineer-Engineering-Dispro...
If you're experienced (senior or higher), it's still a good read, but fewer things will surprise you.
I’m surprised I don’t see more advice to read a language- or domain-specific book. If you know what type of technology you want to work on and what language(s) you want to use, I’d read a book or two to gain expert-level understanding of those languages or domains. I cannot tell you how beneficial it has been to me to read books covering all the intricacies of C, C++, and Rust. Not to mention countless pages of documentation covering the Linux kernel, shell scripting, etc. Even if you have great general software engineering skill, you still have to be able to quickly read, write, understand, and modify the code you work on. You never know when you might find yourself 50 files deep in an exploration of why some open source software behaves a certain way that’s really boiling your blood, or when you need to parse the code to find an undocumented feature you’re certain exists (or, if not, to hack it in). Knowing the language is very beneficial for this, and getting eyes on open source code to recognize common patterns is very useful.
* measuring things (evidence gathering, performance, comparisons, stats, research). Most developers cannot do this on any level and yet have the balls (stupidity) to advocate so boldly for their opinions.
* data structures. There is a very old best practice: composition over inheritance. That advice runs far deeper than it sounds because all aspects of a good application should be interchangeable and extensible structures. That applies to both theory like functional programming as well as practical like interfaces, APIs, and data in transport.
* writing. Programming, in the brain, is no different than writing an essay in natural language. It requires executive planning, expression, organization, and refactoring. The better you get at writing prose, articles, and proposals the easier it gets to write the first draft of an original application. It’s so much more than just writing documentation and most programmers struggle with all of this.
* transmission. Read the protocol RFCs and attempt to write original implementations. Most programmers cannot do this and yet a deeper understanding of data in movement will provide capabilities you, and your competition, can never before imagine.
"A Philosophy of Software Design" is mentioned a lot, +1
"The Missing README" is full of pragmatic advice to get from 'my code works' to 'my code is in production'. Many of the barriers to success have nothing to do with algorithms and everything to do with the organization running the project. It's marketed to new engineers, but I think anyone who writes software would get something out of it.
"Elements of Clojure" by Zach Tellman is a fantastic high-level architectural philosophy about how we build and compose abstractions. Only wish that the title wasn't tied to the Clojure programming language (most of the book is applicable to any language despite the title) and was a bit longer.
"Tidy First" is the first in a series by Kent Beck, a quick exposition on how to separate structural changes (architecture, paying down tech debt) from behavioral changes (new features, bug fixes). You need both, and you can use economics as a guide for when to invest in one or the other. But you need to treat them differently.
Test-Driven Design by Example is a good (and fun) read.
* “The Design of Everyday Things”. Have you ever pushed on a pull door, or vice-versa, because it was unclear how it worked? Designers call those doors “Norman Doors”, now, after the author of this book Donald Norman so effectively dissected and criticized them (among plenty other objects). Too many APIs suffer similar problems—and if you don’t want yours to, this book is a great place to start.
* “On Writing Well”, by William Zinsser. Good code and good prose have a lot in common: they know what they’re trying to do, are stripped to their clearest components, and have internal structure that supports understanding. Add to that the fact you’ll be writing lots of prose anyway (design docs, postmortems, etc), and the value of writing well should be clear.Depending on the tech stack you're interested in, I would also strongly suggest reading foundational books that go deep into that platform (e.g. the Java Language Specification if you're into Java [1]). These are not things you necessarily need to read end-to-end or understand completely, but your global understanding of your chosen platform will expand significantly.
Systems Performance by Brendan Gregg is another useful classic. While it's about performance, it touches upon a huge number of important topics (from memory allocation to pretty graphs), perusing it will make you smarter.
Is there a reason why this is the opinion nowadays?
I spent years writing Ruby and found clean code OK, but preferred Sandi Metz’s writing. Then I started doing some Go and Bill Kennedy made me think about mechanical empathy more. Recently I’ve been diving back into my old haunt of C, particularly more modern C idioms and the C23 standard as I need very fine grained control for latency and memory efficiency reasons for the apps I’m writing (in a very different space to where I worked in Ruby). It’s kind of blown away a lot of the advice from clean code for me.
The thing you’re programming has a CPU with registers. There’s a stack. There’s a heap. The choices you make choose how those things are used by the language implementation you’re using. Languages and methods that try to pretend none of that is happening can lead to very inefficient code that makes everyone sad.
Yes, your code needs to be readable. It has to be maintainable, but the clean code way of doing things doesn’t seem to do that very well AND introduces patterns that can make it hard for compilers and interpreters to optimise.
But it captures it perfectly, a large number of engineers go from jr to intermediate with their new found tricks. Except they cling to these tricks like it’s law, they have upskilled in one direction while sacrificing the open minded pragmatism for dogmatism. They’ll argue with you about these things, it’s in a book how can you not adhere to it!!?
If you can onboard these lessons and still recognise the spots where it’s begging for some best practice but you should break the rule this time, then congrats you’re ahead of the curve, it takes most engineers a frustratingly long time to get pragmatic. If I had a penny for every awful DRY abstraction that became impossible to reason about, I’d have retired.
Personally I still recommend it to people but with the caveat that they need to think about what aspects from it they adopt and which don't make sense for them in their environment. E.g. if function calls are expensive in the language they use and its compiler doesn't optimize their code by inline the ones it can, then they probably don't want to break things down to the level that Clean Code recommends.
https://github.com/unclebob/cmuratori-discussion/blob/main/c...
The linked video is also a good watch.
But, even then, other resources are better IMO. (Metz, Ousterhout, Kay, PragProg, language-specific design patterns books, etc.)
The experience of doing things wrong is valuable, but I think you also don't want to get quagmired there. It just depends on how voraciously/quickly you read and seek out better patterns.
(Also, elephant in the room, Uncle Bob has been very vocal and opinionated on the internet about various things and it hasn't endeared many to him because of it)
That being said, some of the advice in the book is simply dated, some of it seems to break code down arbitrarily instead of on responsibility.
On top of this, you get people who pedantically follow it and don't let a team of experienced engineers develop a style that works for them it's really annoying and it can make the codebase a bitch to work on.
In the end, it should be a guide. And you should be thinking about what bits to take. But what ends up happening is "uncle Bob says...".
They don't try to understand the spirit of rules, but blindly apply rules to the letter
But sometimes, what you want to do is so complex. You'll want one big file with few methods and a lot of comments.
I think the "perception shift" happened together with public discussions of sqllite.
The tldr would be: just don't consider it a Bible ;)
For example, my go to when using a new framework or library that'll be a core part of a project, is to read its documentation in its entirety. I did this with eg Vue. It's a _huge_ time saver, and the big key, is that it reveals things you would never have known existed! They're things which you wouldn't have stumbled on yourself, but which come in handy in certain moments. Or they're things that would waste your time googling, and which might be difficult to understand out of context. The docs also let you understand the "spirit" of the tool you're using, which will let you work much more smoothly with it, and avoid unintentionally fighting with it and how it was designed to do things.
This is also true for more abstract concepts in CS, which might not come up often, but which are smart abstractions that can come into play at key moments in your projects.
Also with math, most math learning is done by books -- books with exercises, yes, but still books.
But at the end of the day, I think what matters is don't get stuck in one mode. Don't _only_ learn from books, since that won't give you the skills you need. But also don't _only_ learn by doing, since then you'll basically be wasting your time re-discovering the last 100 years of programming/CS experience. Do both!
I think an artist in YouTube summarised this best many years ago. He describes 3 ways to improve at something: innate improvement, inspired improvement, and developmental improvement. Innate improvement being by volume--i.e. if you do it every day, you'll get better even if you're not consciously trying to improve. Inspired improvement is using those bursts of inspiration/interest to propel your skills forward. And developmental improvement being the more traditional, sit down with a book and learn/practice approach. All are useful and contribute to improving, so use them all where possible! Jazza recommends making projects that allow for all three possible types of improvement.
Video: https://youtu.be/Bu3ulVhO3z4
I'm sure a swimmer who reads books about swimming in addition to swimming is better all else being equal than a swimmer who just swims.
Can you show me such a book? Ie a book that teaches one to swim (different strokes etc) aimed at a professional swimmer (athlete).
The field has a lot of gurus who trick newcomers into falacies like 'clean code' when, instead, they should be out there banging together rocks like a JavaScript caveman seeking fire (Lisps).
So you need some sort of built experience that will allow you to consider those rules critically, and only add them to your toolset if it does seem to make sense for you and you understand why, you have past experience where you think "oh - that would have helped me a lot".
Just for context, this was posted to Github by the author of Clean Code himself, Robert C. Martin, while exchanging messages with Casey Muratory [0]. They talk about performance, about testing, and maybe other stuff (I'm at less than half of it)
[0] of Handmade Hero fame, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2dxjOjWHxQ
I think your opinion on OSS/large codebases makes sense, but I don't think it's an either/or situation: reading should _support_ actual coding, similar to how studying a grammar textbook for a foreign language is there to support actually speaking/listening/communicating in that language.
I didn't leave the community because of it. I left it because Ruby was slow as molasses, dynamic typing is a failed experiment (imo) and people would love magic and be proud of it. Which meant systems would break in production more times than I could take and I have done so many on call rotations because someone thought some magic was a fun way of doing it.
For personal projects I used Steel Bank Common Lisp because there the dynamic nature of the language actually has benefits such as programming through the REPL which is much more reliable than typing dynamic code in an editor to build programs.
Once I had to hire people I moved to Go but then again moved to Rust because I want to write programs which do not break, is fast as possible and doesn't take my users' memory and cpu for granted. Who am I to burn their electric bill or data plan while delivering broken buggy software to them. Plus I cannot stand null pointer exceptions and Go due to their ideological drive of remaining "simple" has null pointer exceptions in 2024.
Also the other meta thing I realized was because Rust is harder to get into, the discourse, libraries, tutorials, community is much higher quality compared to anything else I have seen so far so I really enjoy it. Plus Rust has some really cool things like high level maps and functional code while them compiling down to the same Assembly as for loops and other such zero cost abstractions that I like.
I’d agree that I wouldn’t like to support a large Ruby codebase commercially but in team of 1-4 devs and codebase not much larger than 10k lines it’s very productive (numbers pulled from thin air ofc).
I like the idea of learning about human psychology though.
And in general, it also enables you to understand the meaning of some writing for and from others.
Boosting its creativity is a nice bonus.