Books recommendations from Bozhidar’s talk, lists by Uncle Bob, and Kent Beck, books from blog posts by Jeff Atwood and DHH.

Never ask advice of someone with whom you wouldn’t want to trade places

— Darren Hardy

The idea to collect a list of books that knowledgeable, experienced and well-known programmers recommend to read comes to me from The long Journey to Ruby Mastery conference talk by Bozhidar Batsov.

Here I share what I have found so far: books recommendations from Bozhidar’s talk, lists by Uncle Bob, and Kent Beck, books from blog posts by Jeff Atwood and DHH.

Bozhidar Batsov VP Engineering at Toptal and open-source hacker in his talk named 15 books to reach mastery as a programmer independently of programming language:

Even if you have 20 years of experience in programming you can learn a lot from the books above thinks Bozhidar.

This a essential minimum for a good developer.

– Bozhidar

For programmers working with object-oriented languages Bozhidar recommends:

The last book in Bozhidar’s list is The Elements of Programming style.

I asked Robert C. Martin, aka Uncle Bob Martin, software engineer, author, instructor, co-author of Agile Manifesto, for books recommendations. Here is his list:

I asked speaker and author of the Extreme Programming book series Kent Beck, for books recommendations:

Jeff Atwood author of Coding Horror blog and co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse, share his list of Recommended Reading for Developers:

Some of them Jeff mentioned in the comments on the page:

Jeff added links to Amazon as well and put his opinion under every book in his list.

David Heinemeier Hansson, aka DHH, creator of Ruby on Rails, founder and CTO at Basecamp, author, and public speaker share the 5 books that meant most for him:

David comments on each book in his post, and I recommend reading it.

All book links above are lead to Amazon store that is closest to your country. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.