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With the new year just around the corner, here are a few books you may want to consider reading as part of your New Year’s resolutions.  I’ve read/own these and can fully recommend them from personal experience.

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt, David Thomas

For anyone that spends a significant amount of time coding, this book is definitely a must have.  It will give you a new way of looking at the way you design and code, essentially turning it into an artform instead of just a routine task.  Being pragmatic means being practical and efficient.  Spend a few hours skimming through this book and you’ll save hundreds of hours later on. You can read my book review here.

Beautiful Code
Beautiful Code is a collection of short case studies written by lead programmers from around the world.  Anyone that likes learning by example will love this book.  What better way to learn than from other people’s mistakes and experiences?

Code Complete by Steve McConnell
This book is similar to Pragmatic Programmer in that it talks about a lot of the same stuff.  No harm in reading both though since they offer a slightly different slice of the same pie.  I strongly believe that computer science courses should teach these concepts to all programmers so that programming can become anyone can love doing.

Regular Expression Pocket Reference
This one isn’t just a must-read, it’s a must have! Regular expressions are a mixed bag for programmers.  Most will find that they are extremely useful when needed and can make a complex problem very elegant.  However, most will also find that they don’t practice them often enough to fully master them.  This is why I find this pocket reference to helpful.  It includes examples in all of the popular languages APIs (Java, PHP, .NET and C#, Python, vi, JavaScript, Ruby etc.)

The Case of the 500 Mile E-mail
This last must-read isn’t a book but rather a very funny and interesting story of a campus E-mail administrator who comes across an impossible problem.  I won’t ruin any more of it, but definitely read it for a good laugh!

What other good books (not necessarily computer related) would you recommend as a must-read for a programmer?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 at 10:38 am and is filed under Efficiency, Reviews, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.