Jeff Atwood
Software developer and writer; co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse, author of the Coding Horror blog.
About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper
It's a fantastically useful book; I've used whole chapters as guides for projects I worked on.
on blog.codinghorror.com · 2 Feb 2004
Code Complete 2 by Steve McConnell
Steve McConnell's Code Complete 2 is the Joy of Cooking for software developers. Reading it means that you enjoy your work, you're serious about what you do, and you want to keep improving.
on blog.codinghorror.com · 2 Feb 2004
Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug
The single best book on usability I've ever read. The title says "web usability" but don't be fooled by its faux specificity. Steve Krug covers every important usability concept in this book, and covers it well.
on blog.codinghorror.com · 2 Feb 2004
Peopleware by Tom DeMarco
If you have any legitimate aspirations to be a "Team Leader" in practice instead of in name only, you need to pick up a copy of this book.
on blog.codinghorror.com · 2 Feb 2004
Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley
Programming Pearls is the next best thing to working side by side with a master programmer for a year or so. It is the collective wisdom of many journeyman coders distilled into succinct, digestible columns.
on blog.codinghorror.com · 2 Feb 2004
Rapid Development by Steve McConnell
Rapid Development isn't about rapid development. It's about the reality of failure. The vast majority of software development projects will fail: they will overrun their schedules, produce substandard results, or sometimes not even finish at all.
on blog.codinghorror.com · 2 Feb 2004
Regular Expressions Cookbook by Jan Goyvaerts and Steven Levithan
I may be a card carrying member of the "Keep It Simple Stupid" club, but I'm making a meteor sized exception for regular expressions. Written properly, they will save you a tremendous amount of time in string manipulation, and I've never run across a project where they didn't come in handy somewhere.
on blog.codinghorror.com · 2 Feb 2004
The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
Designing software is difficult, to be sure, but designing a door is difficult too. The nuances of design extend into every object you touch, whether it's some hot new SQL engine, or a humble shoe.
on blog.codinghorror.com · 2 Feb 2004
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper
This is the book that introduced the world to the concept of personas: rather than thinking of users as an abstract, difficult-to-describe, amorphous group of people, personas instruct us to talk about specific users who have names, personalities, needs, and goals.
on blog.codinghorror.com · 2 Feb 2004
The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks
I challenge any developer to pick up a copy of The Mythical Man Month and not find this tale of a long-defunct OS, and the long-defunct team that developed it, startlingly relevant.
on blog.codinghorror.com · 2 Feb 2004
The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
This book reminds me a lot of Programming Pearls, but it's actually better, because it's less focused on code. Instead of worrying about code, the authors boiled down all the practical approaches that they've found to work in the real world into this one book.
on blog.codinghorror.com · 2 Feb 2004
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte
You don't need to own all four books in the series unless you're a completist (or a masochist, I suppose), but the first two are essential.
on blog.codinghorror.com · 2 Feb 2004
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