Intermediate-level material

Most influential books for programmers

These are books considered most influential for programmers from this StackOverflow thread.

Influential Books List

(I need to break this list out into other list categories)

  1. Code Complete (2nd edition) by Steve McConnell
  2. The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
  3. The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie
  4. Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest & Stein
  5. Design Patterns by the Gang of Four
  6. Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler
  7. The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks
  8. The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth
  9. Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi and Jeffrey D. Ullman
  10. Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
  11. Effective C++ by Scott Meyers
  12. More Effective C++ by Scott Meyers
  13. CODE by Charles Petzold
  14. Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley
  15. Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael C. Feathers
  16. Peopleware by Demarco and Lister
  17. Coders at Work by Peter Seibel
  18. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman
  19. Effective Java 2nd edition by Joshua Bloch
  20. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
  21. The Little Schemer by Matthias Felleisen and Daniel P. Friedman
  22. The Seasoned Schemer by Matthias Felleisen and Daniel P. Friedman
  23. Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby by why the lucky stiff (free PDF)
  24. The Inmates Are Running The Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper
  25. The Art of Unix Programming by Eric S. Raymond
  26. Test-Driven Development: By Example by Kent Beck (free PDF)
  27. Practices of an Agile Developer by Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt
  28. Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug
  29. Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices by Robert C. Martin
  30. Domain Driven Designs by Eric Evans
  31. The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
  32. Modern C++ Design by Andrei Alexandrescu
  33. Best Software Writing I by Joel Spolsky
  34. The Practice of Programming by Kernighan and Pike
  35. Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware by Andy Hunt
  36. Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art by Steve McConnel
  37. The Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler
  38. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy (free ebook)
  39. Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs by Niklaus Wirth (free PDF)
  40. Writing Solid Code by Steve Maguire
  41. JavaScript - The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford
  42. Getting Real by 37 Signals (free PDF)
  43. Foundations of Programming by Karl Seguin (free PDF)
  44. Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice in C (2nd Edition) by Foley, Dam, Feiner, Hughes
  45. Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel
  46. The Elements of Computing Systems by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken(free ebook)
  47. Refactoring to Patterns by Joshua Kerievsky
  48. Modern Operating Systems by Andrew S. Tanenbaum
  49. The Annotated Turing by Charles Petzold
  50. Things That Make Us Smart by Donald Norman
  51. The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander
  52. The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management by Tom DeMarco
  53. The C++ Programming Language (3rd edition) by Stroustrup
  54. Computer Systems - A Programmer's Perspective by Bryant and O'Hallaron
  55. Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C# by Robert C. Martin
  56. Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce
  57. Framework Design Guidelines by Brad Abrams
  58. Object Thinking by Dr. David West
  59. Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment by W. Richard Stevens
  60. Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham
  61. The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
  62. CLR via C# by Jeffrey Richter
  63. Design Patterns in C# by Steve Metsker
  64. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
  65. About Face - The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper
  66. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky
  67. The Tao of Programming by Geoffrey James (free ebook)
  68. Computational Beauty of Nature by Gary William Flake
  69. Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing (free ebook)
  70. Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications by Grady Booch
  71. Computability by N. J. Cutland
  72. Masterminds of Programming by Federico Biancuzzi
  73. The Tao Te Ching by Lao-tzu
  74. The Productive Programmer by Neil Ford
  75. The Art of Deception by Kevin Mitnick
  76. The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World by Christopher Duncan
  77. Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case studies in Common Lisp by Peter Norvig (free ebook)
  78. Masters of Doom by David Kushner
  79. Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas
  80. How To Solve It by George Polya (free PDF)
  81. Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation by Adele Goldberg
  82. Writing Secure Code (2nd Edition) by Michael Howard
  83. Introduction to Functional Programming by Richard Bird
  84. No Bugs! by David Thielen
  85. JUnit in Action by Petar Tahchiev


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Last modified 26 April 2022