Great Programming Books: 2008

Last year, I made a list of Great Programming books. Here is an update to that list.

I have read and highly recommend the following:

• Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
• Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
• Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
• Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
• Steve McConnell, Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction
• Steve McConnell, Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules
• Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

These are often recommended by people who have read the above:

• Alan Cooper, “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity”
• Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister , “Peopleware – Productive Projects and Teams”
• Martin Fowler, “Patterns of Enterprise Architecture”
• Eric Freeman, Elisabeth Freeman, Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates, “Head First Design Patterns”
• Erich Gamma et al, “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software”
• Andrew Hunt and David Thomas , “The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master”
• Bertrand  Meyer, “Object-oriented Software Construction”

Other people’s ideas about great programming books:

• Jeff Atwood: Programmers Don’t Read Books — But You Should
• Scott Hanselman: Essential Language Agnostic Computer Programming Books
• Shane Sherman: The 5 Books that Every Programmer Should Read
• ProgrammingBooks.org
• Stack Overflow: Best non-development book for software developers
• Stack Overflow: What development book made the most impact on you as a developer?
• Stack Overflow: What is the single most influential book every programmer should read?
• Stack Overflow: What non-programming books should programmers read?
• Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books, Ever

Advertisement