Recommended Reading

I read…a lot!  These are books that I’ve read that have contributed significantly to the way I think about technology, programming, work, and life.  I know the list is long, but I think all programmers need to read these books.  Some are repeated if they are under multiple categories.  If you’re short on time (or just don’t enjoy reading), I’ve bolded specific books that you should focus on in certain categories:

Architecture and Software Design

  • Design It! (Keeling)
  • Release It! (Nygard)
  • Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides)

Soft Skills and Leadership

  • Design It! (Keeling)
  • Being Geek: The Software Developer’s Career Handbook (Lopp)
  • Crucial Conversations (Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler)
  • Lean In (Sandberg)
  • Strengths Finder 2.0 (Rath)
  • Emotional Intelligence 2.0 (Bradberry and Greaves)
  • Debugging Teams (Fitzpatrick and Collins-Sussman)
  • Developer Hegemony (Dietrich)
  • How Women Rise (Helgesen, Marshall)
  • Holacracy (Robertson)
  • Reinventing Organizations (Laloux)
  • No Hard Feelings (Fosslien and Duffy)
  • Big Feelings (Fosslien and Duffy)
  • Unfu*k Yourself (Bishop)
  • The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck *(Manson)
  • Turn the Tide (Obear)
  • Pragmatic Thinking and Learning (Hunt)
  • Why do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (Chamorro-Premuzic
  • Making Work Visible (DeGrandis)
  • The Staff Engineer’s Path (Tanya Reilly)

Business

  • The Art of Business Value (Schwartz)
  • Holacracy (Robertson)
  • Reinventing Organizations (Laloux)
  • The Model Thinker (Page)
  • It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work (Fried, Heinemeier)

Design Patterns

  • Refactoring Databases (Ambler and Sadalage)
  • The Pragmatic Programmer (Hunt and Thomas)
  • Growing Object-Oriented Software (Freeman and Pryce)
  • Head First Design Patterns (Freeman)
  • Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides)
  • Core J2EE Patterns (Alur, Crupi, Malks)
  • Enterprise Integration Patterns (Hohpe, Woolf)
  • Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (Fowler)

Common Practice

  • Clean Code (Martin)
  • The Pragmatic Programmer (Hunt and Thomas)
  • Rework (Fried and Hansson)
  • Refactoring Databases (Ambler and Sadalage)
  • The DevOps Handbook (Kim and Humble)
  • Continuous Delivery (Humble and Farley)
  • Lean Enterprise (Humble, Molesky, and O’Reilly)
  • The Phoenix Project (Kim, Behr, and Spafford)
  • The Unicorn Project (Kim)
  • Growing Object-Oriented Software (Freeman and Pryce)
  • Making Work Visible (DeGrandis)
  • The Effective Engineer (Lau)
  • Ask Your Developer (Lawson, Ries)
  • Clean Agile (Martin)

Technical

  • Building Microservices (Newman)
  • SQL Antipatterns (Bill Karwin)

Testing

  • Growing Object-Oriented Software (Freeman and Pryce)

Algorithms and Data Structures

  • Cracking the Coding Interview (McDowell)
  • Grokking Algorithms (Bhargava)

Data and Visualization

  • Good Charts (Berinato)
  • Managing Data in Motion (Reeve)

User Interaction

  • Don’t make me think! (Krug)
  • Rocket Surgery Made Easy (Krug)

Career

  • Linchpin (Godin)
  • Design It! (Keeling)
  • Being Geek: The Software Developer’s Career Handbook (Lopp)
  • The Pragmatic Programmer (Hunt and Thomas)
  • Reinventing Organizations (Laloux)
  • Lean In (Sandberg)
  • Cracking the Coding Interview (McDowell)
  • The Personal Mba (Kaufman)
  • Developer Hegemony (Dietrich)
  • How Women Rise (Helgesen, Marshall)
  • Holacracy (Robertson)
  • The Staff Engineer’s Path (Tanya Reilly)

Diversity in Tech

  • Lean In (Sandberg)
  • How Women Rise (Helgesen, Marshall)
  • Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders (Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic)

Economics

  • Wikinomics (Tapscott and Williams)

Learning and Creativity

  • Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman)
  • Make Good Art (Gaiman)

Miscellaneous, or books that are awesome that just don’t fit anywhere else!

  • The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (Harris)
  • Waking Up:  A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Harris)
  • JPod (Coupland)
  • Bit Rot (Coupland)
  • ok, anything by Douglas Coupland!
  • Sapiens (Harari)
  • The Children of Men (P.D. James)
  • The Passage (trilogy) (Justin Cronin)
  • The Power (Naomi Alderman)
  • Dark Matter (Blake Crouch)
  • Artemis (Andy Weir)
  • The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)
  • Recursion (Blake Crouch)
  • Ready Player One (Cline)
  • Red Rising (series) Pierce Brown
  • The Signature of All Things (Gilbert)
  • The City of Girls (Elizabeth Gilbert)
  • ok, anything by Elizabeth Gilbert!
  • Enlightenment Now (Pinker)
  • Lilith’s Brood (Butler)
  • Stardust (Neil Gaiman)
  • ok, anything by Neil Gaiman!
  • Scatter, Adapt, and Remember (Newitz)