One of the blogs I follow is Simple Programmer by John Sonmez.
While I haven’t seen many of his Pluralsight courses (I will get round to it one day), I do enjoy reading his comments on his blog, and I do think John is very good at explaining things, particularly for beginners, and this tends to give me ideas – I’ve coached or advised a number of relative beginners over the years.
John has recently posted his “Ultimate List of Programming Books” on his blog. This is something that I’m trying to develop on this blog also, although progress is slow for me because I’m in the process of slowly going through my favourite books so I can properly review them on this blog – it may take me up to a year or longer to double the size of my recommended lists and review them all.
Anyway, here is the link to John’s Ultimate List of Programming Books. Most of these would be on my list also.
My favourites from his list are:
- Soft Skills by John Sonmez himself – John calls this “The Software Developers Life Manual” – this is a good software development book covering everything apart from the technical side.
- Code Complete 2 – this is another classic. However I find it quite difficult to read, its more like a reference. I have the original version in hard copy and the second version on Safari Books Online – its difficult to follow with all the jumping around between pages. I’ll try to give this book a better review in future.
- I like all the Head First books, these are good introductions to quite complicated subjects.
- Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans – this is one of my favourites on design and should ideally be read when you have some experience of OOD – or you could read Head First Object Orientated Design for a primer before reading this book.
- Clean Code by Robert C Martin and the Clean Coder by Robert C Martin. I don’t quite agree with John when he says some of the advice is hard to swallow. What Uncle Bob is really on about with these books is he is getting us to think about dependencies and clearly showing the intent in our code – i.e. making code as readable as possible so its clear what its doing without making bugs that are difficult and expensive to find. I think all programmers should read these books with a totally open mind and then see how they can apply some of the ideas to their own work.
Please refer to my preferred software development books on this site for more information. I will eventually link in my reviews to these pages as well when this blog really gets going.