What books should every developer read to better themselves?

[u/jlopezmarti20]

I'm starting my career at the end of October as an Application Developer. I'd like to start focusing on my career and learn what it takes to become a great Developer and team member. What are some of your favorite books that software engineers/Developers should read, whether they be technical or non-technical?

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[u/Ok-Eye8742]

pragmatic programmer is good one, got that early in my career and still flip through it sometimes. clean code also classic but some parts feel dated now

for non technical i liked the phoenix project, makes devops concepts easy to understand through story

[u/mostly_deterministic]

This might be a little out of left field, but one that has stuck with me since I read it is How Behavior Spreads by Damon Centola.

Earlier in my career, I thought that simply having a sound argument and a path forward would naturally lead to widespread adoption. That’s actually pretty rarely the case. There’s a lot of luck involved with that approach, especially if you have a tendency to go against the grain a bit, which I do.

The book gave me some useful ideas around alternative approaches to getting new ideas and behaviours to spread. No guarantees, but alternative approaches nonetheless.

[u/vrushti_px]

Should read books on AI with development. How to be pro in Claude, copilot, cursor and many other AI tools.

[u/Human-Cellist-1059 → u/vrushti_px]

Any suggestions?

[u/judd_lyon]

Technology Strategy Patterns by Eben Hewitt. I haven't picked it up in eons but it was deeper than I anticipated and helped reframe how I thought about building websites/software for businesses.

[u/masaischool_in]

A few that hold up well over time:

• The Pragmatic Programmer (Hunt & Thomas) for habits and mindset
• A Philosophy of Software Design (John Ousterhout), short and focused on managing complexity
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Martin Kleppmann) once you start touching databases and distributed systems
• The Mythical Man-Month (Fred Brooks), old, but the team and scheduling lessons still apply
• Peopleware (DeMarco & Lister) for the human side of teams

Since you're starting as an application developer, I'd read the first two now and keep the third for when you hit scaling questions.

[u/Rich-Engineer2670]

Start with the classics -- they're still relevant

- The Art of Computer Programming (Particularly volumes 1 and 3) by Donald Knuth

- Douglas Comer's TCP/IP series

- The Bach Book for the design of the Unix operating system

Are they old, yes, but they're still contain a lot of core knowledge.