Books Programmers Don't Really Read (2008)

I've read the books on both of those lists, among many others. Not because these are all required reading, but because I've had a long career and I've fought to continually improve my knowledge in Computer Science. It seems rather arrogant of the author to decree that one list is canon and the other list is not. Each of those books has its use. Does this mean that someone needs to read any of those books to be good at…

I actively disrecommend Code Complete. I bought the first edition back when I uncritically acquired everything with a Jolt Award logo. It's a pile of tautologies and common sense. It tries to teach stuff that is best learned through experience. K&R was my second C book, and I love it for its authenticity, but I learned more from Kelly & Pohl's "A Book on C". The Mythical Man Month I read in anger after a project failed. It not only…

> The Dragon Book covers everything you need to know to write a compiler. No it doesn't because it only covers techniques you can use in implementing and optimizing old-school static languages. But today a language is more than just the compiler, with modern VMs coming into play, and runtime optimizations aren't covered ... for instance if you want to implement a tracing JIT compiler, your only hope is to read the source-code of some available VM. Or if you…

There are books that nobody reads because they don't contain good ideas, and there are books that nobody reads because they're too dense. The second category contains some of the most valuable books out there. I'd put the gang of four design patterns book into the second category. Often, a book or journal article is there to be cited as a breakthrough work on a subject, but very few people read it - instead, they read the thousands of other…