Slashdot Mirror

You might want to take a look at Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books, Ever (if you want to go by what is popular) or The Best Programming Books (which seems to be more diverse).

Personally I really liked the Mythical Man Month (one of the few library books I borrowed as an undergraduate and I've recently reread it and still like it) and Peopleware (very funny) but both of these are more about software engineering (and how it goes wrong) rather than practical hands on programming. However they are both short and entertaining. Code Complete is very authoritative (but big). These aren't books you are going to gravitate towards if you are just starting to program for the first time though so I'll just mention I found Java in Nutshell useful (but others are not so keen on it).

Your borrowers are probably going to want those "Learn in 24 hours..." or "...for Dummies" though. It would be nice to know what the most loaned books turned out to be in year's time (might make a good Slashdot article : )

Take a look at ProgrammingBooks.org. It even has a handy Books Every Programmer Should Read section.

Alternative best book lists are linked to in one of my other posts in this question.

Take a look at ProgrammingBooks.org. It even has a handy Books Every Programmer Should Read section.

Alternative best book lists are linked to in one of my other posts in this question.

I created this site about 6 months ago for programmers to rank their favorite programming books. The concept is simple, you rank your top 5 favorite books for a particular subject like "Ruby" or "Software Engineering". Specifically here are the top ranked Ruby Books. And here's the list of Top books every programmer should read. Of course, this only really works well if more people rank books, so if you've read this book, rank it(and any other ones you've read).

I created this site about 6 months ago for programmers to rank their favorite programming books. The concept is simple, you rank your top 5 favorite books for a particular subject like "Ruby" or "Software Engineering". Specifically here are the top ranked Ruby Books. And here's the list of Top books every programmer should read. Of course, this only really works well if more people rank books, so if you've read this book, rank it(and any other ones you've read).

I created this site about 6 months ago for programmers to rank their favorite programming books. The concept is simple, you rank your top 5 favorite books for a particular subject like "Ruby" or "Software Engineering". Specifically here are the top ranked Ruby Books. And here's the list of Top books every programmer should read. Of course, this only really works well if more people rank books, so if you've read this book, rank it(and any other ones you've read).

Rank this book if you've read it!
http://www.programmingbooks.org/PHP

There's a lot of horrible programming books out there. I wrote this web app to help programmers easily find the good ones. Basically programmers rank their top 5 books based on category(in this case, php books). It only works if people use it though, so rank the good programming books you've read!

I hate to shill my own stuff, but I recently created a site for ranking programming books based on category(language, api, etc) that I think most developers will find very useful. Basically programmers rank their top 5 books for each category. It's very simple, and hopefully useful. It's in a pain finding quality programming books. The only real resource is browsing/searching through amazon, which can be a real pain.

http://www.programmingbooks.org/

For example, here are the top ranked CSS books: http://www.programmingbooks.org/CSS (not many users have ranked css books)

I hate to shill my own stuff, but I recently created a site for ranking programming books based on category(language, api, etc) that I think most developers will find very useful. Basically programmers rank their top 5 books for each category. It's very simple, and hopefully useful. It's in a pain finding quality programming books. The only real resource is browsing/searching through amazon, which can be a real pain.

http://www.programmingbooks.org/

For example, here are the top ranked CSS books: http://www.programmingbooks.org/CSS (not many users have ranked css books)