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Comment by f2ender | Hacker News Reader

I have a CS degree so I have read the basic texts on Algorithms, Operating Systems, Compilers.

I recently got through the Design Patterns book. I was thinking of picking up either a new language (Go) or start the "Mastering Regular Expressions" book, not sure which.

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I think that, in most cases, regular expressions will do you more good as a tool than Go will. I have not read Mastering Regular Expressions, but due to their ubiquity, they have probably led to a 5% increase in my productivity as a software engineer. I highly doubt that Go will do that for you except in some very rare cases.

Have you considered reading some software engineering classics as well?

Code Complete, Rapid Development, The Mythical Man-Month, The Pragmatic Programmer, Peopleware and A Discipline for Software Engineering? (The last one is controversial).

I have read Peopleware. I was thinking about getting The Pragmatic Programmer next. I somehow feel that just reading books without doing anything with the knowledge doesn't work.

The books I enjoyed the most were Richard Stevens' Network Programming and Unix Programming books. Those books teach you a ton of things while helping you implement something useful. They were very hands on. I haven't been able to find anything similar in a long while.

I think we're on different pages. The books I recommended aren't API, framework, language, CS kinds of books. They're books which discuss being a software engineer.

Are they immediately applicable? Sometimes. Are they applicable for the rest of your career? Definitely.

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