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Books for Programmers

Posted by matijs 19/02/2012 at 12h46

My list of all-time-favorite books for programmers. I’m not saying everyone should read these, but each of these had an important impact on my growth as a programmer. These are not necessarily in chronological order, by the way.

First, books that are mostly independent of your choice of programming language:

Design Patterns and Refactoring are not books to be read cover to cover, since they they devote quite a large part of their volume to catalogueing. The other two definitely are.

The following books are each really about a particular language. They’re well written, but it’s hard to separate the impact of the books from the impact of the languages.

  • Programming Perl (a.k.a. The Camel Book). This book made me grasp object-oriented programming for the first time by breaking it down to a very basic level. I did most of my learning Perl from this book.
  • Programming Ruby (a.k.a. The Pickaxe Book). I learned Ruby from the free online edition. It got me hooked.

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