I’m an avid reader. A really, really avid reader. I grew up reading everything I could get my hands on (including a lot of things that weren’t, ahem, age-appropriate) and as an adult I still love reading so many different things. I picked up a Kindle in about 2008, and never looked back.
Over the years, I’ve built up quite a backlog of technical books. Ooh, that looks good, one-click buy, and then forget about it. And there are a lot of great writers out there writing a lot of really great things, on topics I wish I knew more about but never got the time to learn. So now I’m making a pledge - to read and work through a whole pile of the e-books I already own, and expand my horizons.
I’m still building these lists, they’re a work in progress, but here goes. I’ll update them as I add more, or as I tick things off.
The “Definitely” pile#
I’m definitely going through a bit of an Elixir kick at the moment, so the following all go straight on the list:
- Programming Elixir - Dave Thomas
- Metaprogramming Elixir - Chris McCord
- Elixir in Action - Saša Jurić
- The Little Elixir & OTP Guidebook - Benjamin Tan Wei Hao
As well as trying to get a more fundamental grip on functional programming:
- Functional Programming for the Object-Oriented Programmer - Brian Marick
- Learn You a Haskell For Great Good! - Miran Lipovača
At heart I’m a Ruby programmer though, and there are some popular Ruby-related books I’m a little ashamed to say that I haven’t read:
- The Ruby Way - Hal Fulton, André Arko
- The Rails 4 Way - Obie Fernandez, Kevin Faustino
- Metaprogramming Ruby 2 - Paolo Perrotta
- Trailblazer - Nick Sutterer
- Objects on Rails - Avdi Grimm
And then there’s another pile of miscellaneous books, that don’t fit in any of the categories above:
- ember-cli 101 - Adolfo Builes
- Actionable Gamification - Beyond Points, Badges and Leaderboards - Yu-Kai Chou
- Building Web Reputation Systems - Randy Farmer, Bryce Glass
- Code Complete - Steve McConnell
- Clean Code - Robert C. Martin
- Rapid Development - Steve McConnell
- Pragmatic Thinking and Learning - Andy Hunt
- Practices of an Agile Developer - Venkat Subramaniam, Andy Hunt
- Exercises for Programmers: 57 Challenges to Develop Your Coding Skills - Brian P. Hogan
- Soft Skills - John Z. Sonmez
The “Maybe” pile#
And of course, there’s another stack of books that I own that sound cool, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get to reading them. Things like:
- Object Thinking - David West
- The Art of Agile Development - James Shore, Shane Warden
- Software Estimation - Demystifying the Black Art - Steve McConnell
- ng-book - Ari Lerner
- The Passionate Programmer - Chad Fowler
- Growing Object-Oriented Software Guided By Tests - Steve Freeman, Nat Pryce
But what about…?#
Of course, there are some very common and popular books not listed above, such as the following:
- Confident Ruby - Avdi Grimm
- Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby - Sandi Metz
- Practicing Rails - Justin Weiss
- Rails 4 Test Prescriptions - Noel Rappin
The reason they’re not listed? I’ve already read them! :D They’re all really really good, and I highly recommend all of them.
Am I insane for starting such a list? Quite possibly. Will I ever finish it? Maybe. Who knows. But my first journey will be to continue reading Programming Elixir (as I’m halfway through it already), and then will continue from there! Wish me luck!
(And send me suggestions if you think I’ve missed any must-read books!)
Edit 5th August - Added Exercises for Programmers and Soft Skills to the list of misc books that I definitely want to read. At least I’m close to finishing Programming Elixir!