Programmers Don't Read Books -- But You Should

definitely, the text [about programmers not reading books] is present [in the original 1993 Code Complete]. It appears at the end of page 760.
Time machine? A citation from 1999 in a 1993 edition would indeed be prescient (-:

The 1993 edition of Code Complete cites ‘DeMarco and Lister 1987’, which is the first edition of Peopleware.

Unfortunately it’s a reciprocating problem. Programming books are written by programmers, and those that don’t read typically can’t write well.

I hate books.i just manipulate things up .

Interesting. If a physician said he/she didn’t own Gray’s Anatomy, or if a chemist said he/she din’t own the Rubber Bible, I’d lift an eyebrow. Knuth has the answers for most of your programming problems, superbly written, superbly typeset, and superbly bound. The 2nd editions are a pleasure to read, hold in one’s hands, and to drowse over at midnight. I’ve shown them to ME’s, EE’s, acountants, and attorneys, and the universal reaction has been astonishment that technical books could be so beatutiful.

What’s that between Defensive Design and Website Usability? Designing the Obvious?

When I look up a coding question on Google, I usually quickly get an answer to my question.

But when I read a book, I get the answers to a lot of questions that I haven’t even thought of asking yet.

Also, when I read a book online, all I get is a headache.

That’s a great list of books, but I wish fewer people had taken “The C Programming Language” literally and left us the legacy of two-character variable names.

I miss books that had personality. The books which were written explaining stuff. Not dumbing down, not hiding author’s ignorance, not throwing up a ton of reference-style pages. I remember Peter Norton’s book on PCs. It was that what made me intereted in computers at the time…

books that I’m currently reading

SICP
On lisp
Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming

For algorithms there is the book Introduction to Algorithms, and Part II Problem Solving of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. But for new technologies like user interfaces in Windows Forms it is hard to find good books, especially in Romania. And I also did not find a good practical book about the details of the software development (requirements gathering, scheduling, source control usage, debugging, testing and so on).

Good programmers write good code
Great programmers steal great code
:slight_smile:
Then who writes the great code? :stuck_out_tongue:

I clicked the books you recommended (I owned 3 of them before reading this blogpost). Funny is that the Amazon’s page of Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering states that Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought and 3 others from your 5 follow. You are a powerfull blogger :-).

The low quality of many books is explained in this article by Philip Greenspun.
http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/story.html

I don’t read so many boooks on programming now. Though I used. I try to focus my attention. For programming languages I look for the definitive books, not the Dummies Books. For how to program well in a language I look for the experts, like Scott Meyers.

Sadly I do not see the likes of P J Plauger or Jon Bentley anymore.

I used to follow the pragmatic guys and the agile guys, but they been publishing so many books ( compare to two or three really important books for Structured Programming )–makes me wonder if it’s all hype to promote themselves, their business and sell a lot of books.

Can anyone recommend any good books on embedded programming?

Indeed, there are books to read for everyone, no matter what you’re looking for. Take the bookshelves you presented, for example. Perfect for a programmer, I say.

Very very interesting and informative post !
Thanks keep writing such great posts

Im a novice programmer. I started out reading “beginning programming” in 24 hours. Cover to Cover. I felt like it really was a good into, even considering i couldn’t write 1 meaningful program in any language after reading it, but it was a foundation at least of the terminology. Then on to Python for dummies. It was fun, and i can now code basic stuff. I just get a little jealous of other tech geeks, who are really good at programming who claim they never took a single class or read one book… Where am i going wrong…? I will continue to read these posts for insight…

Nice list. Hey why all the hatred for the Perl for dummies author? I’m going to buy it just to see how bad it is! :slight_smile:

According to the comments of this post http://antoniocangiano.com/2009/08/15/do-programmers-still-buy-printed-books/ programmers (the good ones) still read books and they favour printed copies.

I know I do at least.

When did you sneak into my study and take a picture of my book shelf? Not a complete match but certainly there is a lot of commonality there, and just looking round one of the oldest I have to hand is Stroustrup’s Design and Evolution of C++ and although I did often buy reference books back in the pre-internet days they are all long gone. The classics just keep being useful, I mean you wouldn’t see a 20th anniversary edition of “The Windows 32 API Reference Guide” but The Mythical Man Month is just as relevant today and even my 20th Anniversay Edition is now 12 years old!

But even if programmer’s don’t read books they don’t read off the web either, the only time they do is when they need to do something and want to find the answer so you end up getting The CodeProject Programmer who just pulls together a bunch of code from sites like CodeProject but if something goes wrong have no idea how to solve the problem. Learning on the job is fine but then it needs to be structured and guided into better ways of using that knowledge and when indeed to use that knowledge. I know that my continued usefulness in this industry is only because I never stopped learning, and it pains me to see how many people think that having a degree means that is all they need.

All I would say is all us who care have a obligation to keep banging the drum wherever we are to ensure that we together raise the professionalism of this noble art.

Nice! BASIC Computer Games made the shelf! That was the first programming book I ever read.

I come into this upside down, I think, because I was a book lover before I was a programmer, and I read programming books before I got into university. Code Complete was the first programming book I read, and it was a good first choice.

There’s a big difference between reading for theory and reading for reference. Nobody keeps “Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, And Computation” around for reference, but it’s valuable background for learning about compilers and high-level languages.

I have mixed feelings about Safari books online. They have some great books, but the formatting sometimes leaves something to be desired.