The most recommended software books

Wow! This book is exactly what every programmer has always wanted to know or even felt guilty about not knowing and it’s all presented in an extremely simplified and fun way. 

This is one of those books where you get excited in the morning when you wake up because you know you are going to be able to read more in the book and you are hoping the book will never end.

It’s rare to find a big book that I enjoyed reading so much and felt so short. This book covers almost everything you ever wondered about computer science. After reading this book, I felt like I finally understood everything a programmer was supposed to know and I no longer felt that nagging feeling of being an imposter.

“Good agile testing is good context-driven testing applied in an agile context.”

The authors of this book summarize their decades of experience in software testing in over 100 lessons they learned. Follow them along different aspects of the tester’s job, as they re-tell various stories collected over the years with some clear guidance to surviving and testing project.

These software testing industry leaders have some timely contextual advice in here – whether you work as a tester on an agile team or in a more traditional fashion.

Microsoft Secrets principles are great theory, but how do they feel in practice? Here is the Microsoft version of Tracy Kidder’s classic Soul of a New Machine.

A team of eager Microsoft engineers and product managers go for it, trying to build a children’s encyclopedia to extend the success of Microsoft’s earlier Encarta product. The genius of overlapping defined roles on a quest for a common goal comes face to face with the confusion, surprises, conflicts, diversions, disappointments, and elations inherent in most large-scale software programs trying to do something new (and aren’t they all?). Theory and intensely human practice come together.

When trying to become a better Java developer, there is so much to learn.

97 Things covers, well 97, of them in a series of brief essays. What’s cool is that the essays were written by different people so you get lots of points of view on what is important. Topics range from language (comments, fat jars) to the ecosystem (benchmarking, frequent releases) to the language-agnostic (definition of done and breaking down problems.)

Note that two of these are mine. The book is thin at just over 200 pieces. And since each “thing” is short, it’s easy to read on the go.

The second book from Gregory and Crispin brought me up-to-date on the different trends in the Agile world, ten years after having delved into their first book.

How do you share the quality mindset in a DevOps culture? What about Design Thinking? With many more examples from the industry, the two authors made me curious about some of the things that I had ignored until I read their book.

Many agile projects employ user stories as a way to represent requirements rather than a more traditional approach combining use cases and functional requirements. I favor the latter approach for several reasons. Nonetheless, user stories are well established in the agile development world, and if you wish to learn about them, there’s no better author to read than Mike Cohn. Cohn describes how to craft user stories well and how they fit into the agile development process.

This book is set in the same universe as The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project, but it's at a new company named investments unlimited.

It's also a fictitious story, but with all brand new characters, and brand new problems! In this book they cover security much more deeply than any of the other previous books, talking about how compliance and audit can work together with the information security and DevOps teams.

They talk about common problems that I have faced in many organizations, and a lot of the stories feel so familiar I wonder if the authors have followed me around throughout my career.

Although of course they save the day in the end, there are many parts of the book where we're not quite sure if they're going to make it or not with various characters learning to see things in new ways, so that they can make… show more.

Gerald M. – Jerry – Weinberg is my most-often quoted author.

Having spent more than 50 years in the software world, Jerry was able to write in a timeless manner about the lessons he learned. Over the years, he collected more and more stories he survived from, including all aspects that brings software from an idea to a product that everyone can use.

In this first volume in his Quality Software Management series, he will extend your perspective with Causal-Loop Diagrams and thereby introduce you to the world of Thinking in Systems.

The takeaways from his stories are fostered in easy-to-remember laws and principles that he gives you as a free takeaway summary in the end as well. Extend your perspective on managing for quality rather than staying oblivious.

Not only does this book provide insight into the planning and development of one of the first visual IDEs, it’s overflowing with hilarious, profound, and pragmatic real-life lessons for how to manage a software team and deliver a complex project.

As a product of its time, the writing isn’t always politically correct. However, many of the lessons and memes are still part of our vernacular today: Don’t flip the bozo bit; If you build it, it will ship; and [Love] the customer.

Some of its lessons should be memes: Beware of [an engineer] in a room, Be an authority, not an authority figure, and Don’t trade a bad date for an equally bad date.

Some sections show their age in our current world of continuous delivery, but few current books have the humor and concise insight of this remarkable work.

Many of the most significant principles of effective software development are timeless. They’re independent of the development life cycle or model, programming language, application type, and so forth. Although this book is quite a few years old now, nearly all of its contents are still valid. The 201 principles cover the full spectrum of software engineering: general principles, requirements engineering, design, coding, testing, management, product assurance, and evolution. The descriptions of each principle are concise, whereas my 60 lessons in Software Development Pearls go into a great deal more detail and offer many practical techniques.

There’s an unfortunate tendency among young software people to disregard knowledge from the past as irrelevant to them. That’s not correct. This book can help close significant gaps in any practicing software developer’s knowledge.