A list of good books for and involving software developers and the software industry. Not limited to programming.
This is a work in progress.
Sections and titles are alphabetically arranged.
- Elon Musk
- Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire
- iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It
- Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary
- Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points that Challenge Every Company and Career
- Being Geek: The Software Developer's Career Handbook A collection of Michael Lopp's blog entries.
- Own Your Tech Career: Soft skills for technologists This is a good compendium on managing your tech career.
- Team Geek
- The Staff Engineer's Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change
- General
- TBD
- Amazon Web Services
- TBD
- Google Cloud Platform
- TBD
- Kafka
- Kubernetes
- BGP The definitive guide but dated.
- Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach
- Cloud Native Data Center Networking: Architecture, Protocols, and Tools
- Foundations Of Modern Networking: Sdn, Nfv, Qoe, Iot, And Cloud A dense overview of modern networking.
- High Performance Browser Networking Not just for frontend engineers.
- Internet Routing Architectures
- Interconnections
- Internetworking with TCP/IP - Vol 1 A classic. Although a bit dated, this was my first networking book, and it remains my recommendation for beginners who want a good overview.
- Internetworking with TCP/IP - Vol 2
- TCP/IP Illustrated, Vol. 1: The Protocols
- TCP/IP Illustrated, Vol. 1: The Protocols
- The TCP/IP Guide: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Internet Protocols Reference "Comprehensive" describes this mighty tome best.
- A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
- Dreaming in Code
- Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell
- Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer If you read this, also watch the film "Pirates of Silicon Valley" based on it.
- Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software
- Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
- How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone
- I Sing the Body Electronic Fun fact - The name of the book is based on Walt Whitman's poem "I Sing the Body Electric", although it's culturally closer to Ray Bradbury's short story of the same name as the poem.
- John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing
- Masters of Doom An enthralling narrative of how the iconic FPS Doom was created.
- Move Fast: How Facebook Builds Software
- Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft
- The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage A very readable account (from 1989) of tracking down computer hackers.
- The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal
- The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier
- The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann
- The Soul of a New Machine One of the classics of the computer age, this book had remarkably foresight in predicting our industry's current work culture.
- UNIX: A History and a Memoir
- What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
- Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet
- Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays
- Hackers and Painters Paul Graham's essays.
- In the Beginning...Was the Command Line
- The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky
- The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings On Linux And Open Source By An Accidental Revolutionary
- The Psychology of Computer Programming
- Cryptonomicon
- Islands in the Net
- Mona Lisa Overdrive
- Snow Crash
- The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
- The Shockwave Rider
- Virtual Light
- Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming
- Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages
- Programmers at Work: Interviews With 19 Programmers Who Shaped the Computer Industry
- Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager
- Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management
- Constantine on Peopleware
- Death March
- Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
- Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software
- Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency
- The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
- The Mythical Man-Month
- The Peopleware Papers: Notes on the Human Side of Software
- Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment
- Design of the UNIX Operating System
- Linux Kernel Development
- Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces
- The UNIX Programming Environment
- UNIX Internals
- Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations
- Continuous Delivery
- Platform Engineering on Kubernetes
- Scalable Internet Architectures
- Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
- Terraform: Up & Running: Writing Infrastructure as Code
- The Art of Capacity Planning
- The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations
- Web Operations: Keeping the Data on Time
- General
- 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts
- Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think
- Code Complete
- Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change
- Hacker's Delight
- Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware
- Programming Pearls
- Refactoring
- The Practice of Programming
- The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
- The Psychology of Computer Programming
- Working Effectively with Legacy Code
- 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know
- A Philosophy of Software Design
- Architecting for Scale
- Beautiful Architecture: Leading Thinkers Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Software Design
- Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications
- Designing Distributed Systems: Patterns and Paradigms for Scalable, Reliable Services
- Designing Object-Oriented Software
- Domain Driven Design
- Object Thinking
- Understanding Distributed Systems: What every developer should know about large distributed applications
- Scalability Rules
- The Architecture of Open Source Applications
- The Architecture of Open Source Applications, Volume II
- Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry
- Big Billion Startup: The Untold Flipkart Story
- Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age
- Direct from Dell
- Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer
- Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything
- Inside Intel
- Facebook - The Inside Story
- Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
- Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made
- Sunburst: The Ascent of Sun Microsystems
- The Difference between God and Larry Ellison
- The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
- The Google Story
- The Perfect Store: Inside eBay
- The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
- The Story of Commodore: A Company on the Edge