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Ask Slashdot: What Books Should An Aspiring Coder Read?

Posted by EditorDavid on from the Memorial-Day-weekend dept.

Earlier this month Bill Gates released his summer reading list, which included Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson and mathematician Jordan Ellenberg's book How Not to be Wrong. Now an anonymous Slashdot reader asks for your book recommendations. I've been trying to learn more about coding, but I need a break sometimes from technical documentation and O'Reilly books. Are there any good books that can provide some good general context and maybe teach me about our place in the history of technology or the state of the programming profession today?
In the U.S., Memorial Day is considered the "unofficial" first weekend of summer -- so what should be on this geek's summer reading list? Cracking the Coding Interview? Godel, Escher, Bach? This year's Nebula award winners? George Takei's The Internet Strikes Back? Leave your suggestions in the comments. What books should an aspiring coder be reading?

5 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. Answered by another resource coders should know by ATMAvatar · · Score: 5, Informative

    What is the single most influential book every programmer should read?

    --
    "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
  2. Unix Power Tools by somenickname · · Score: 3, Informative

    Unix Power Tools is from O'Reilly but, it's not really a traditional book. It's more like 1000 pages of super useful Unix anecdotes. When I've worked at companies that had interns, I've always bought a copy for them and dropped it on their desk. I would consider it required reading for anyone working on Unix/Linux machines.

    1. Re:Unix Power Tools by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Informative

      I'd add The C Programming language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. I know the OP asked for non-technical stuff, but that book offers some great historical context and is very readable. It's also really useful for programmers who are used to higher level languages like C# and Javascript, because it will help them understand what those languages developed from and what the core mechanisms without all the managed code stuff are.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  3. UNIX Power Tools by inode_buddha · · Score: 5, Informative

    UNIX Power Tools by O'Reilly is a great treatise on programming in general because it does concepts such as loops, conditionals, environment, I/O, formatting, etc etc.... all via shell scripting, no "hardcore" compiled languages. Just 1056 pages of the concepts of programming, with examples and loads of documentation. You can take the concepts into oher languages easily enough later on. I've been re-reading it over and over for almost 20 yrs now, its that good.

    --
    C|N>K
  4. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 3, Informative

    Comment removed based on user account deletion