Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

Not a manual, handbook, or guide per se - but I've learned an awful lot from reading Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Program... (https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Programming-ebook/dp/B00ACC2536/) Coder’s At Work is a collection interviews with several brilliant programmers. This book gave me confidence during a time where I didn’t have much. My main take away was that every programmer was different and have different values. There was no archetype, it destroys the notion of identity (all programmers are this, went to this school, care about these things, are good at this, wear hoodies, etc). Must read.

Maybe a bit more of a downer than you have in mind, but I read Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine and I thought parts were interesting, especially the discussion of the links between TOR and US intelligence. Seibel's Coders at Work is really fascinating and it's great to get all these different perspectives, some of them really tearing down current orthodoxy (like the interview about how nobody really reads code or jwz making fun of software blogs). Free as in Freedom, about Richard Stallman, was also a book I enjoyed reading a lot, although I understand the subject hated it (it's been a while, but I recall it being a pretty sympathetic portrait, but unflattering in parts). I'm interested to know if anybody read the Carreyou book about Theranos. It sounds like it could be good.

Peter Seibel's Coders and Work also provides an interesting perspective. As the title implies, it focuses more on developers than founders...although in some cases, the developer being interviewed was also a startup founder. Some of the interviews give an interesting look at the early days of some companies, too. I found jwz's interview provided some good insight into the early days of Netscape, as well as the reasons why the company started to go downhill.

You might enjoy Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution[1]. It's not too focused on specific people or companies, although you'll encounter some well known people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Richard Stallman in the book. It's an interesting read because it gives you a great background that helps you understand how we ended up with the tech culture and environment we have today. In the reply to another comment, I also mentioned Coders at Work[2]. I found that it provided some great insight into the early days of some fascinating companies from a technical perspective. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven-Le... (https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven-Levy/dp/1449388396) [2] https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Program... (https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Programming/dp/1430219483)

I finished "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Kahneman - A slow read, but a good one. He talks about the intricacies and surprising observations about how me take decisions. "Logicomix" - A brief "history" of logic, its not always historically accurate. Did I tell you its a graphic novel? "Show Your work" - Aston Kleon - A short motivating read about sharing ones work, he makes some good arguments for sharing the process as well, not just the product. Picked up "Coders at work" - read two chapters, a great read so far (I know its pretty popular one amoung HN)

"Coders At Work" http://www.codersatwork.com/ It doesn't have either code or very specific recommendations. It's a number of interviews with great programmers. Reading it is like talking to brightest minds in programming and getting precious pieces of advice from them. How they approach problems, debug, what tools use, how they came to programming and why they love it. For me that book was a huge injection of inspiration to master my programming skills and enjoy programming.

Coders at work The numbers behind Numb3rs Statistical methods in counterterrorism Total recall (the biography by Schwarzenegger) From dictatorship to democracy (available for free here: http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations98ce.html) The miracle of mindfulness The design of everyday things Escape from camp 14

The Passionate programmer [Pragmatic series] - On how to develop yourself as a programmer Coders at work - For inspiration