#DevDiscuss Recommends Programming Books

Some people love programming books; some people hate them. I, clearly, am one of the former. And so while reading through the latest #DevDiscuss Twitter chat, I started taking note of which books were most recommended by DevDiscussers.

The following are the greatest hits, collected in an easy-to-browse format with links to Amazon.

The medalists: these three books had 5+ recommendations apiece.

• Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin
• Code Complete by Steve McConnell
• The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt

Books on project management and writing good code:

• The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers by Robert Martin
• Coders At Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming by Peter Seibel
• The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick Brooks

Books on refactoring and maintaining good code:

• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler
• Refactoring To Patterns by Joshua Kerievsky
• Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers

Books on software architecture and design patterns (language-agnostic):

• 99 Bottles of OOP: A Practical Guide to Object-Oriented Design by Sandi Metz
• Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices by Robert Martin
• Domain Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software by Eric Evans
• High Performance Browser Networking by Ilya Grigorik (also available to read online)
• Just Enough Software Architecture: A Risk-Driven Approach by George Fairbanks
• Production-Ready Microservices: Building Standardized Systems Across an Engineering Organization by Susan Fowler

Non-technical books to inform your programming:

• The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh
• The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
• Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures As the World's Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin Mitnick
• The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

Language-specific books:

• Eloquent Javascript by Marijn Haverbeke (also available to read online)
• If Hemingway Wrote Javascript by Angus Croll
• Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby: An Agile Primer by Sandi Metz
• Programming Ruby: the Pragmatic Programmer's Guide, aka the Pickaxe Ruby book, by Dave Thomas, Andy Hunt, and Chad Fowler
• You Don't Know JS series by Kyle Simpson (also available to read online)