The Developer’s Bookshelf: My Favorite Reads for Professional Growth

I wanted to share some recommendations on books that I have enjoyed reading. They have given me valuable information that has helped me in my career as a software developer.

The Pragmatic Programmer: Your Journey To Mastery

Maybe the book that made the biggest impact on how I work as a software developer. Read it, and become a pragmatic programmer. Learn about things like avoiding programming by coincidence. This book was first released in 1999 and is now updated and revised to reflect the changes in our field. It’s filled with practical advice to make you a better developer. I think that it should be mandatory reading for any developer.

On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

Writing software is not that different from writing an article. This book will teach you techniques to write text that are easy to read and understand, characteristics that we want our code to have. By structuring our code as an article, we give the reader a fast overview of what it does. The reader can decide to learn more about a specific function by following the flow of the story. It explains the Single Layer of Abstraction principle in an easy-to-understand way.

Atomic Habits

You can change your life with tiny changes in behavior. By continuously making tiny changes, we can get remarkable results. It presents a way to build good habits and break bad ones.

Pragmatic Thinking And Learning: Refactor Your Wetware

As a developer, we constantly need to learn new skills. This book will teach you how the brain works and how we learn. We are introduced to a model for skill acquisition and how that affects how we learn new skills. By being aware of this model, we can adapt how we teach skills to others.

Ask

By asking the right questions, you discover what your customer wants. This book is about marketing, but we can use the method to understand what our customers want the software we are building to do.