Must read books for every developer

A few years back, I got suck into a conversation of my colleagues on book reading and it surprised me. And not in a good way. In a conversation of six, four of them didn’t read books (apparently due to lack of time) and one read only popular Sci-fi and fantasy books. The remaining one was me. I am far from being well read, but I still try to read a few books a year on tech and non-tech topics.

If not for books, techies definitely follow blogs. Don’t they? Not really. One person didn’t read blogs. Two followed blogs, but not tech ones. The remaining three had a daily routine to browse most popular blogs and find others, if work took them that way. Looking at results one can conclude that three developers out of six participating in the conversationĀ (a stunning 50%) didn’t have a clue of what is going on in their field of expertise.

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Clean code by Robert C. Martin

There are authors that suit you and there are authors that don’t. Having spent a decent amount of time to get through Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship, I have found out, that Mr. Martin fails to suit me. His self admiration and belief that he is new software messiah (and as such, cannot be mistaken) is intolerable to the extent, when I literally had to convince myself from chapter to chapter to read the book until bitter and inconclusive end.

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