The below books are not typical books you may see on reading lists for full stack developers, which is a pity since these books are extremely valuable.
I tried to stay away from “programming cookbooks” and focus more on books that focus more on concepts and implementations. For example, these five books are around security, databases, system architecture and general software development.
I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!
Security
Ted Harrington brings it home with this excellence read on application security. You may not be in security, but after reading this book, you will definitely have a different outlook on the importance of security in your own applications. It may even motivate you to get into the security field.
This one book is one I don’t see mentioned a lot. Maybe because it was published in 2011. But don’t let that date fool you. This is a must read for any serious full stack developer. Majority of the book is still extremely relevant for today. One of the creators of burpsuite (application security testing tool) is the author of the book. The sheer amount of detailed information that you will learn by reading it is amazing. You don’t have to be in security or be a pentester to understand it. It talks about real features that we build or use everyday on the web and their vulnerabilities. Guarantee after reading this book, you will definitely look at your own web applications differently.
Database
Great book for developers who work with databases. It doesn’t matter if you write SQL for applications to consume, or if you use ORMs to do it. If you work with databases, you should read this book. It’s more of a “deep dive” into databases. It explains things at a high level but well enough for you to understand how databases are structured and how they access data. You will definitely look at your SQL differently after reading this one.
Software Development
If you are a bootcamp grad, CS grad, new developer with less than 3 years, you mentor junior developers, or IT department manager this book is a must read. It’s a handbook for everything you need to know starting out that you didn’t learn in your bootcamp course, CS course, or in your first few years without a mentor.
It gives great advice on how to improve your programming skills, tech debt, working with legacy code, version control best practices, coding best practices, how to use config files and logs in your projects, testing, code reviews and much much more.
Great book!
System Architecture
If you work in an environment that uses the microservice architecture, or your team is considering it, this book is a great read. It takes you from foundation to implementation. It talks in detail about testing, monitoring and security. All three are things you may get wrong if it’s your first time working with microservices.
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