Mon 26 Mar 2007

My List(s) Of Working Programmer's Books

A couple of weeks ago, Bill de hÓra published his updated list of ten books for the working programmer. There are other such lists around, of course. Bill's list was the one that most recently crossed my eyesight and reminded me I've been meaning to publish my own list.

It's not completely clear what the rules of this game are, so I had to invent my own a little bit. I've stuck to Bill's choice to be language and platform neutral, as much as possible. Rather than try to pick ten books I think everybody should read, I wrote a list of books I currently use regularly and find useful in my day-to-day work. I've added a few near-finalists and some other interesting books at the end, too.

Any list like this is going to be swayed by the experiences and interests of the author. I realised my list is a bit more skewed towards process than practice than it might have been five years ago. This is partially a reflection of the fact that I've done a lot more project and team management in the last few years than at any previous point. All the books on this list are ones I either consult regularly as a reference, or try to re-read every now and again to keep the thoughts moving around in my head.

In no particular order:

• Introduction to Algorithms (2nd ed), Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein
• Algorithm Design Manual, Skiena
• Pragmatic Programmer, Hunt, Thomas
• The Art of Project Management, Berkun
• Rapid Development, McConnell
• Practical Cryptography, Ferguson, Schneier
• Lessons Learned In Software Testing, Kaner, Back, Pettichord
• Don't Make Me Think, Krug

First obvious difference with other "top 10" lists: mine only has eight items. Life's like that sometimes.

I'm surprised that Introduction to Algorithms doesn't get more words written about it. Sure, it's a pretty fundamental book. However, it includes a lot of the basic thoeretical underpinnings about the algorithms and implementation differences for algorithms that just isn't written down in other places. I don't use this book every day, but when I need the details of many algorithms, it's the first book I'll reach for. Still, this really is a fundamentals book, whilst the Algorithm Design Manual is more educational and thought provoking for real world, large information set problems.

I often work around problems that require security of various levels. Practical Cryptography is a bit like Introduction to Algorithms, albeit at a slightly more mathematical level, in that it gives a very solid theoretical grounding in the fundamentals of hashing and encrypting. It is futile to enter a discussion about the security of one approach over the other if you don't know this information and can't back it up with a reference to a book like this. Cryptography being a fast moving area of reasearch, a four year old book is going to show some dating by now, but it's still something I use regularly to back up my hunches or as a citation source.

Most of the others should be self-explanatory if you've read them. There appears to be some genuine controversy about whether Scott Berkun's book on project management is great or gross (see the comments on Bill's post, for example). I was surprised to see that my take was almost identical the thoughts Bill expressed in a comment — the Berkun book is very practical.

I'll just mention, too, that most lists like this include Steve McConnell's Code Complete (usually meaning the 2nd edition). I'm not a great fan of that book. It's a nice read and I have no argument with the content or approach. It's just not a book that I've found helped me a great deal. The McConnell book in my list above, Rapid Development is one I get more use out of as a way of translating between my brain and a more professional, standard way of presenting ideas. Using McConnell's approach and terminology eases the presentation to more formal project managers and decision makers.

There are some near misses. Mostly books that I have gotten a lot of education from, but no longer use on a regular basis because I feel I have absorbed their lessons. All of these books still sit on my shelves, though, and I would give them to versions of myself that were five or ten or 15 years less experienced (not all at once, some require more experience than others to be useful):

• Master Regular Expression (Friedl)
• Herding Cats: A Primer For Programmers Who Lead Programmers (Rainwater)
• Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World (Duncan)

The Friedl book on regular expressions makes a lot of peoples' lists, but I've never really struggled with regular expressions, so once I'd absorbed the lessons on optimisation and testing in different engine types, I found I wasn't going back to it too often. I recently re-read the latest edition and didn't feel I'd forgotten much. I may be weird in this way, though — I enjoy regular expression munging and use it a fair bit, so it stays fresh in my brain.

The other two books are of a much more practical, professional nature. As I worked in different organisations (or even the same organisation with revolving reporting charts), I needed to work a lot more on my pragmatism. I didn't (still don't to some extent) handle bad working conditions well when I'm trying to produce technical product, or manage other people to do the same. So this was an area I needed to put a lot of learning into over the past five years. These books would have been useless to a ten-year-younger version of me, but came along at the right time when I needed them.

Finally, some books that, whilst not indespensible, have been a great inspiration for learning more and thinking in different ways about my areas of expertise:

• The Deadline (de Marco)
• Game Programming Gems, Graphics Programming Gems
• Mathematical Writing (Knuth)

De Marco's book is a great presentation — via fiction — about why project management is hard in the real world. Knuth's book on writing is special because it covers specifically technical writing about theoretical, logical work and focuses on presentation and differing approaches. Although about mathematics (obviously), which was how I first discovered it, a lot of the lessons transfer well to theoretical computer science presentations as well. Maybe not useful to the intensely practical programmer, but more than once I've had to prove that a program or approach worked and document that. The ... Programming Gems books are just a good source of short algorithm fragments and can make learning fun. If you can't have fun in this industry, you're just not reading the right books.

Topics: books, software