Can you recommend INSPIRING books for software engineers?

Goncalo Marques

“One of my favorite books is “The Phoenix Project”. It is not a technical book (so not really a programming book), but it’s rather about IT culture and DevOps. I liked it a lot because you can read it as you read any other kind of novel, and it shows you how IT can be compared to traditional processes in manufacturing. It also introduces you to “The Three Ways” of DevOps. On top, I would also include “Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations”. For more recommendations, you can check out this reading list: https://octopus.com/blog/devops-reading-list.

“Clean Code. It’s a bit older but a classic that shows how you easily write, read, understand, and change code. A lot of times people like to write complex code that only one person understands. Then other members of the team have to spend hours to understand it. In my opinion, it’s a mandatory book for any FE or BE developer.”

Laureano Ortega

Tiago Santos

“I find “The Programmer’s Brain” very interesting. It’s basically about how our brain works and how we think about code.”

“If you’re a fan of “The Phoenix Project”, you should also read “The Unicorn Project” and of course “The DevOps Handbook”. I can also recommend “The C++ Programming Language” book.

Flavio Moringa

Mike Frey

“It’s not a programming book, but the concepts apply to broad system architecture: The 5th Discipline. A good one is also Gayle Laakmann McDowell’s “Cracking the Coding Interview”, for process it’s “Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams” by Tom DeMarco, and if you want to learn about the Liveness in Jira, it’s “Java Concurrency in Practice”. My favorite chapter about programming is in the “Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship” book. And let’s not forget the classics “Thinking in Java” and “Effective C++: 55 Specific Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs”.

Picture from Unsplash by Fang-Wei Lin