Learning how to become a better software developer is a daunting task. There is so much to learn and it seems like everything is changing constantly.
Because of this, it's easy to dismiss books as a resource for advancing your skills. Surely everything that people wrote about 10 years ago cannot still be relevant today, right?
Wrong!
Even though frameworks and even programming languages come and go (or at least become less popular), the concepts behind them stay the same.
The internet is an amazing resource for learning (especially dev.to 😉). But free resources in the form of a 700-word blog post usually cannot even scratch the surface of their topic.
It's also really hard to separate good blog posts from bad ones especially if you are new to the topic they are discussing. Nobody reviews blog posts (the comment section on hackernews excluded). It's even extremely rare to have someone proofread a blog post before posting (yes, nobody proofread this 😅).
Books, on the other hand, are a lot more work. They are written, proofread, edited, rewritten, approved and finally published and printed. Now all of this doesn't necessarily mean that the content is going to be good, but that's where book reviews come in.
As software developers, we will never be able to stop learning. When investing our time we have to make sure it's well spent. Because of this I strongly recommend you prioritize reading books over blog posts. Of course, read everything that you can or want, but try to spend more time on books than blogs.
If you don't know where to start, here's a quick list of books that I think are worth your time. All of them have been published for a long time and are still very much relevant today.
- The Pragmatic Programmer by David Thomas, Andrew Hunt
- The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr (also see The Unicorn Project that came out late last year)
- The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks
- Code by Charles Petzold
- Design Patterns by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides
- Refactoring by Martin Fowler
- Test-Driven Development by Kent Beck
- Domain-driven design by Eric Evans
Have a book you think every developer should read? Let me know about it in the comments!
Top comments (1)
I do! Grokking Algorithms. 😊
I just published an article about it, called How Cute Animals Got Me an ‘A’ in Data Structures & Algorithms. It will be reposted to the DEV community in a couple days.
Thanks for sharing this list. Knowing the books people value helps me become a better software developer.