Ask HN: What's the best development book you've read?
I've heard a lot about Code Complete and The Pragmatic Programmer. Are these still the must reads? Are there others that you highly recommend?
I feel like Pragmatic Programmer would be a good book to read before starting your first job, or maybe your undergraduate year of college.
I was going to start Code Complete next, but Pragmatic Programmer was so disappointing I decided to read fiction for the next few weeks instead.
So to answer your question, the best language agnostic development books I've read are:
1. Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity
2. The Best Software Writing I
3. Hackers and Painters
I always wish Joel would come out with a second volume of #2, or to start his blog up again. I've yet to find something that equals his quality since he stopped writing.
Name a book that does! The corpus of evidence in our field is quite weak and doesn't support almost any interesting claim you might make about it. For example, there's no empirical data supporting version control [1].
There are books that purport to derive software development lessons from the research literature, but they're either not very good (because they rely on crappy studies and/or go beyond what the studies support) or not very interesting (because they merely transcribe the results of very narrow studies). An anthology of the literature was published recently [2], and it falls in the latter category. I bought it to get the state of the art in empirical research and found it contained almost nothing of use to me as a practitioner. Many of the studies were shoddy (e.g. qualitative case histories--a euphemism for "anecdote") and the better ones are so careful to limit themselves to the tiny experiments they did that you can't derive anything from them. I could mention a couple of exceptions, though, if anyone's interested.
I think the root problem is that software development is complicated, so to do rigorous formal studies on it is expensive. The amount of funding available for this work is a drop in the bucket of what it would need to be. In short, the market value of empirical evidence on software development isn't high enough for anyone to pay for it.
[1] http://neverworkintheory.org/2012/12/12/empirical-evidence-f.... and http://neverworkintheory.org/2012/12/30/why-we-need-evidence.... Notice that the HN discussion of the first post completely failed to answer its question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4931251.
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Making-Software-Really-Works-Believe/d...
Outside the box, I'd recommend Heinlein's Time Enough For Love, for the attitude. Be as self reliant as possible, be as skillful as possible, be as useful to your team as possible. Find or grow an excellent team.
The books cleanly talks about and focuses on writing good code and unlike a lot of others, tells why writing code is a craft and not a mere JOB.
It (kind of) enlightened me as to why OO programming is such a mess. I dont know of any similar, language agnostic book though...
Also, functional programming is such a mess.
I think you get my point.
But many come close:
- Code Complete - 1st Edition. I have both Editions 1 and 2. Edition 1 is very good and has a lot of stuff worth reading and practicing.
Kernighan and Pike's The Unix Programming Environment.
Kernighan and Ritchie's The C Programming Language.
Would have to think of other good ones, though there are sure to be some.