Top 10 Books Every New Software Developer Should Read
The following is a list of the top books for new software developers to read. I chose books that provide long-term guidance that will be useful for many years.
You must always be learning if you want to be a skilled software developer. Reading good books is one of the best methods to learn.
The following is a list of some of the top books for beginning software developers to read. I chose books that provide long-term guidance that will be useful for many years to come.
Top Books: The Tech Resume Inside Out
What a good developer resume looks like and how to write one
This book will assist you in creating a developer resume that accurately reflects you, highlights your skills, and boosts your chances of being recruited. It’s a step-by-step guide produced by the people who evaluate resumes: engineering managers and technical recruiters at tech firms. Free for developers who have lost their jobs.
Cracking the Coding Interview
189 programming questions and solutions
Cracking the Coding Interview provides you with the necessary interview preparation to land the best software development jobs. This is a highly technical book that concentrates on the software engineering skills you’ll need to ace your interview. The book is about 500 pages long and contains 189 programming interview questions and answers, as well as other helpful information.
Top Books: Things They Don’t Teach You in Software School
Letters from a mentor
This book offers the most important information for any junior developer just starting out in the industry. It’s a simple and quick read. The author mentored a young developer for two years when they were just starting out. He decided to compile all of the advice he’d ever given and publish it in this eBook after several chats with her.
Letters to a New Developer
What I wish I had known when starting my development career
Beyond the coding, find out what you’ll need to succeed as a developer. The lessons in this book will help you advance your profession by sharing real-world lessons and failures. Wouldn’t it be great if you could learn from the mistakes of others in the workplace? “Soft” skills are critical to success, yet they are often learned on the job or, worse, never learned at all. Understanding these skills and how to improve them will help you become a more productive team member and a more appealing hire.
This book will teach you the essential skills you’ll need, such as how to ask questions, when and how to use common tools, and how to work with others in your team. Each will be given in context and from numerous perspectives, allowing you to rapidly absorb and apply them to your own professional life.
Top Books: Soft Skills
The software developer’s life manual
Soft Skills: The Software Developer’s Life Manual is a one-of-a-kind guide that provides techniques and practices for a more fulfilling career as a software developer. John Sonmez, a developer and life coach, covers a wide range of critical “soft” themes in it, from work and productivity to personal finance and investment, fitness, and relationships, all from a developer’s perspective.
Coding is the most enjoyable element of most software engineers’ jobs. Dealing with clients, peers, and managers, staying productive, establishing financial security, staying in shape, and finding real love are the difficult parts. This book is here to assist you.
14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers
Including tips from tops developers from Google, Microsoft, Spotify, Amazon, and more
You can study the most popular frameworks, utilize the best programming languages, and work for the biggest tech companies, but it will be difficult for you to become a top developer if you establish negative habits. This book does not provide a clear road to success or a pre-determined formula for success. A quest led to the creation of this book. A journey to discover what habits might be developed to improve one’s software engineering skills.
Top Books: Extreme Programming Explained
Embrace change
Software development projects can be fun, productive, and even daring. Yet they can consistently deliver value to a business and remain under control.
Extreme Programming (XP) was created to solve the unique challenges of small-team software development in the face of ambiguous and shifting requirements. Many common assumptions are challenged by this new lightweight methodology, including the long-held belief that the cost of modifying a piece of software must inevitably climb considerably over time. XP understands that projects must work hard to accomplish this cost reduction and then capitalize on the savings once they have been realized.
Clean Code
A handbook of agile software craftsmanship
Even bad code can get the job done. However, if code isn’t well-written, it can knock a development team to its knees. Poorly written code wastes countless hours and major resources every year. It doesn’t have to be that way, though.
Clean Code is a book written by the author and his colleagues to distill their finest agile practice of cleaning code on the fly into a book that will implant the values of a software craftsman in you and make you a better programmer, but only if you work at it.
Top Books: The Pragmatic Programmer
From journeyman to master
The Pragmatic Programmer examines the essential process of taking a requirement and producing workable, maintainable code that delights its users, cutting through the rising specialization and technicalities of modern software development. It covers everything from personal responsibility and professional development to architectural strategies for keeping your code adaptable and reusable.
Refactoring
Improving the design of existing code
Refactoring is a method for improving the design of an existing codebase in a controlled manner. It consists of a sequence of modest behavior-preserving modifications, each “too small to be worth executing.” The cumulative effect of each of these alterations, on the other hand, is rather considerable. You can lessen the danger of making mistakes by doing them in tiny steps. You also avoid having the system break while you’re restructuring it, allowing you to gradually remodel a system over time.
This book describes the process of refactoring and spends most of its time explaining how to do the various refactorings – the behavior preserving transformations.
The Nature of Software Development
Keep it simple, make it valuable, build it piece by piece
This book walks you through the steps that enable good Agile projects to offer better software faster and at a lower cost, starting with the need for value and ending with the precise actions that help good Agile projects deliver better software sooner and at a lower cost. The author invites you to follow his path of learning and understanding from a half-century of software development and his early involvement with Agile methodologies through simple sketches and a few words.
The book begins with our inherent drive to obtain something of value and proceeds to cover software development. A picture and a few paragraphs accompany each topic. You’re encouraged to think about and absorb each topic. Consider how each stage in the process connects to the next. You’ll start to grasp why Agile approaches ask for the things they do, and why a sloppy Agile implementation will only yield restricted results.
Conclusion
Reading good books is one of the best ways to learn and grow as a software developer. It complements your day-to-day learning at work.
Have you read any of the books on my list? What did you think?
If you could recommend books for new software developers, what would it be and why? Let me know in the comments.
Related Article:
https://dzone.com/articles/books-every-new-software-developer-should-read