Daniel Mendelsohn

these are so good i own paper copies

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  Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

  Charles Petzold

  1999

  This is such a great book for anyone like myself who did not grow up as a programmer or did not go to school for a Comp Sci degree. This book takes you from Morse Code all the way up to the inner workings of a CPU. There is a much more up-to-date 2nd edition, but I have not read that and can only speak to the 1st edition.

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  Smart and Gets Things Done

  Joel Spolsky

  2007

  Years ago, my manager at the time attended a hiring event. One of the booths at the event had Joel Spolsky, and he was giving out free copies of this book if I remember correctly. My manager grabbed 2 copies for both of us. This was my first look into managing developers. It is short but covers almost everything you really need to know about hiring and cultivating programmers.

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  C Programming: A Modern Approach

  K. N. King

  2008

  I have a secret: while everyone is running to learn and use TypeScript, Rust, Go, and whatever else is coming down the pipe, I had always wanted to learn C. I have the K&R book, but that is best left for a Severance character to read. I was reading in some forum somewhere, and this book was highly recommended. From the first chapter, I could tell this is what I needed. The way this book explains C is much more in tune with how my mind works. It is like K&R with all the extra explanations you need for it to make sense.

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  Designing Data-Intensive Applications

  Martin Kleppmann

  2017

  I was always too intimidated by the scale a company like Google has to serve. How is this possible? What kind of secrets do they have? Well, one thing is tons and tons of compute, but how is that data ingested, stored, and managed? If you want to understand how to deliver scalable, maintainable, and fault-tolerant systems, this is the handbook.

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  Design by Numbers

  John Maeda

  1999

  OK, why is this here? A design book? Well, in a former life, I was a designer and knew nothing about code. But one day, I found John Maeda, and I became hooked on what code could do, especially in design. This book strips bare all the abstractions on top of abstractions in development today and brings you just the basics of what it is to speak to a computer. I always say the best way to bring out creativity in people is by giving them constraints; let’s see what you can make in a 100 by 100 pixel creative canvas. Sadly, DBN is very out of date, but I’m sure a lot of people have heard of its successor, Processing.

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  Crafting Interpreters

  Robert Nystrom

  2021

  I never thought i would understand compilers, i'm not sayin i do now, but this book started to get me there. The writing style is this book is so approachable about such a inaccessible topic. You most certainly do not need to read this for most development careers, but if you really want to understand what is going on after you have saved and run your source file, this book starts you on your journey.

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  Revolution in The Valley

  Andy Hertzfeld

  2011

  What can I say, I’m a Mac guy through and through. I have beta copies of OSX on CD sitting on a shelf. I have a Mac SE sitting in my office, and this book is about the development of the Mac. What is special about this book is that the author was there. He was on the original Macintosh development team. If you long for the good old days of tech before the MBAs destroyed everything, I would give this book a read. I feel like I should revisit it soon.

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  The Nature of Code

  Daniel Shiffman

  2012

  I kickstarted this book back in the early 2000s. If you have ever watched an episode of The Coding Train, you know Dan Shiffman and his fun, free-wheeling style of teaching. Unlike The Coding Train, this book strictly sticks to coding physics experiments. There is nothing more fun than writing code that moves and reacts to your input.