Ask HN: Books that'll make you grok software engineering?
5 by yura | 1 comments on Hacker News.
There are some technology books that are almost unanimously agreed to be of the very highest quality: common traits are the use of concise and clear language, good code style, correct and relevant information and overall superb treatment of the topic at hand. For CS, there's "The Art of Computer Science" series, "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", CLRS's "Introduction to Algorithms". For programming languages: "The C Programming Language", "The Go Programming Language" are a few examples. For system administration, a book comes to mind (for *nix): "Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook". What the equivalent of those books, but for software engineering? I've researched this before, and the names that come up are "Clean Code", "Code Complete" and "The Pragmatic Programmer". But "Clean Code" in not without criticism: it has been criticized for advocating stutter-y functions (4 lines or less), overly descriptive names (isLeastRelevantMultipleOfNextLargerPrimeFactor) as opposed to comments and it's debatable whether the refactored code samples (illustrations of the so-called clean code) are actually good and legible code. "Code Complete" and "The Pragmatic Programmer" appear to be universally praised, except for the fact that these two books have been so influential that most of their content is common knowledge nowadays, and reading those books may not be as enlightening today as when they were first released. I'm wondering if there are books of the same caliber for software engineering, which are not so entry-level and are more up-to-date with current trends (the rise of scripting languages, cloud computing, and OOP not being "the one true paradigm" as it once was).