If we find a person with a rare intellect, we should ask him about the books he reads. A book can define a person’s nature and intelligence. If you are a coder, you should be also a good reader because it develops the mind and the mind is your weapon. You have to train it daily. Before finding any solution to a problem – reading and understanding the problems is the most important if you are a coder or any problem solver. Without good reading and comprehension skills, a person takes more time to understand the problems before solving them.
Below there is the list of the top 10 books every programmer should read. These books not only teach the syntax and semantics of programming languages but also help you to think, organize, and become a good problem solver, which is indeed the most important lesson for a coder. These books are not only for mastering a particular programming language like C++, Java, or Python but will help you to become a Better Programmer.
Best Programming Books You Must Read:
Let’s get started with the list:
1. Clean Code: By Robert C. Martin
This is one of the best classic books for beginners and will teach you all tricks and patterns of writing good and clean code. Every code which runs is not a clean code. Most beginner programmer done this mistake, they just try to solve the problem and hence forgets these factors to write clean and perfect professional code. A Clean Code should be properly readable, and well structured so that it could be reused and debugged easily.
Ideas Presented:
- How to properly name a variable?
- How to write a better method?
- How to structure your code better?
- What is the code smell?
- Why another approach is better than this one?
2. The Mythical Man-month: By Frederick Brooks
According to many software developers in the world, this book is literally a Bible to them. This book will help you build a proper concept about software development, estimates, project management, and troubles in software development. The main theme of this book is “Brooks’ Law ” which says “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”.
Ideas Presented:
- The mythical man-month: measuring useful work in man-months is a myth,
- Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering,
- When working on a second system, you should keep in mind that you shouldn’t over-engineer it,
- Any attempt to fix an error can lead to many new errors.
3. The Pragmatic Programmer: Your Journey to Mastery
This is book is by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, about programming and software engineering. The unique feature of this book is it teaches us in a pragmatic way with a collection of tips to improve the programming and development process rather than the theoretical way. This book will help you to become a pragmatic programmer, an early adopter, to have fast adaptation, inquisitiveness, critical thinking, realism, and a jack-of-all-trades. The book presents development methodologies and caveats, analogies, and short stories too, for example, the broken windows theory, the story of the stone soup, or the boiling frog.
Ideas presented:
- Present development methodologies and processes using many analogies and short stories. e.g, the stone soup, or the story of the boiling frog
- Many concepts were named which get popular in this book, such as code katas,
- More use of methods for making and preserving codes highly adjustable,
- Useful recommendations for estimates of time and expense
- Introduces you to methods of work that you may not yet have considered.
4. Code Complete (2 Edition): By Steve McConnell
If you want to be a great software engineer you should read this book once. This book provides the most useful practical guides to programming and helping developers write better software for more than a decade. This book has a rare blend of classic and fully updated with revised leading-edge coding concepts and examples. With these proper concepts, you can easily understand the art and science of software construction.
Ideas Represented:
- Software craftsmanship, e.g, layout, style, character, themes, and self-documentation
- Coding, debugging, integration, and testing for software development,
- Other important software development aspects such as requirements and documentation,
- The techniques of creating high-quality code, code improvements, and system considerations.
5. The Art of Computer Programming
This is another classic book written by the famous computer scientist Professor Donald Knuth. This book is very popular and highly praised by many of the top programmers in the world for its combined mathematical exactness with outstanding humor throughout the chapters. Through his well-known book series art of computer programming, for his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms, Knuth was awarded the Turing Award in 1974. The book begins with basic programming concepts and techniques, explores various programming algorithms and describes their analysis efficiently, and then focuses particularly on the representation of information inside a computer(information structure).
Ideas Presented:
- How to deal with the structural relationships between data elements efficiently,
- How to solve problems effectively using the basic concepts of fundamental Algorithms,
- Semi-numerical Algorithms and Combinatorial Algorithms
- Minimum-Comparison Sorting or Optimum Sorting
6. Programming Pearls
This book is slightly different from the other classics books on the list but this book is one of the most influential books to help a person think like a programmer. Every concept is properly covered with practical problems and various effective and efficient solutions. This is pleasant to read because the writing style is simply great.
This book may not a usual book of new programming concepts but it is the best practical programming book to practice and follow with clear-cut examples. The book challenges your understanding of the core concepts in memory, CPU, and algorithms and gradually increments the difficulties rather than giving you the answer right away because the main motto of this book is to help you become a better problem solver. This book is the best place to practice problems of data structure and algorithms, especially searching, sorting, heaps, etc. It is really a masterpiece created by Jon Bentley fully justifying the name “Programming Pearls”.
7. Code: Charles Petzold
This book introduces us to “The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software” in an outstanding way for anyone who’s ever wondered about the magic and secret inner life of computers and how the working of these complex systems and other smart machines.
Nowadays the low-level details get masked due to the level of abstractions but if you go through this book you can understand those awesome older technologies like Morse code, Braille, and Boolean logic, to understand vacuum tubes, transistors, and integrated circuits. Sometimes to solve a very complicated bug you have to drive deeper to the dead ends of the electronic, binary computer with a von Neumann architecture to reach a scalable solution. It also easily explained many recent developments topics, like floating-point arithmetic, operating systems, packet-based communication protocols, and GUIs.
8. Introduction to Algorithms
This is the single famous book widely used as the textbook for understanding and using an algorithm by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, and Clifford Stein. With over 10, 000 citations documented on CiteSeerX, this book is commonly cited as a reference for algorithms in published papers. The book was also a bestseller programming book with half a million sold copies during its first 20 years. Each chapter in this book covers a broad range of algorithms, their design techniques, and areas of application in depth. Instead of a specific programming language, programming examples are written using pseudo code with rigor and comprehensiveness.
9. Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
This book written by Martin Fowler is an essential book for software developers which offers start-to-finish strategies for working more effectively with large software and improving the design of existing code.
Refactoring is the process of rewriting codes, without changing the functionality, to improve the readability, testability, or maintainability of your code. If you are interested in improving and maintaining the quality of your code this book is for you it contains step-by-step instructions for the implementation of more than 40 proven refactorings examples illustrating with details when and why to use the refactoring. In the second edition of this classic book, it switched from Java to JavaScript for most of the examples but the ideas can be applied to any Object-oriented programming language. The book is well-written and provides samples, examples, diagrams, steps to follow, side notes, commentary, and basically everything you would need to fully understand a refactoring method.
10. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
This is hailed as one of the greatest software development books ever written, describing in great detail the many different design patterns. It has been influential to the field of software engineering and was written by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides, with a foreword by Grady Booch.
This book is a must-read for a budding architect or designer of a complex system. You will most likely be required to read this book to avoid and handle common problems that the industry faces. This book contains an in-detail description of the many different design patterns and is regarded as an important source for object-oriented design theory and practice that have been developed over the years to help software engineers.
The authors discuss various things like the tension between inheritance and encapsulation, parameterized types, Supporting Multiple Look-And-Feel Standards, Embellishing the User Interface, Supporting Multiple Window Systems, etc.
Bonus – Coders At Work
This book offers 15 amazing and interesting interviews of renowned coders or computer programmers who are highly acclaimed in their particular fields. The book focuses on how these programmers achieved so much in their lives and the struggles they did in order to get success. It will help you to learn from their struggles and provide you with the proper step to complete your coding journey. The writer of the book Peter Seibel focused on how these people have tackled their day-to-day programming while revealing many important things and the interesting problems they have solved.
Conclusion
So these are a few books that you must read once in your lifetime in order to gain knowledge about becoming a better programmer. These books will increase your intelligence and help you use your unique mind to become a better programmer.
