The five programming books that meant most to me

The author argues that many programming books are tied to short-lived technologies, while a few focus on lasting principles of writing good code. He presents five books that most influenced his programming style and development, and adds two writing books as also useful for programmers.

Reading notes

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• Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns is described as practical advice on good object-oriented code, with mostly universal principles despite its Smalltalk examples.
• Refactoring is presented as a before-and-after guide that works best when each pattern is read carefully and applied to real code.
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture is valued as a reference for patterns behind Rails and for understanding architectural differences and framework behavior.
• Domain-Driven Design is described as difficult to read but useful for turning a problem space into a clear object-oriented domain model.
• Are Your Lights On? is framed as a book about identifying the real problem, asking whether it is the right one, and restating hard problems in simpler terms.
• The author says programming can be treated as a subset of writing, and recommends Elements of Style and On Writing Well for that reason.
• He concludes that reading these books gives more value to programming skill than years of blog posts and tutorials.