Best Programming Books: 31 Picks Recommended by CEOs

Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman use Scheme to teach recursion, abstraction, modularity and how interpreters and compilers are built, the material of MIT’s introductory course. Patrick Collison lists it, and Santiago Basulto names it as the place to start on fundamentals.

Sebastian Raschka has readers write a large language model in Python without existing LLM libraries, then turn it into a text classifier and an instruction-following chatbot. Lex Fridman recommends it to beginners and experts alike.

Martin Fowler explains how to spot code that needs reworking through bad smells and gives a catalog of refactorings, now with JavaScript examples. David Heinemeier Hansson says he has returned to it again and again, one of just two programming books he rereads.

Kent Beck turns the habits seasoned Smalltalk developers pick up by trial and error into named patterns covering methods, messages, state, collections and classes, plus code formatting. David Heinemeier Hansson calls it his favorite book about programming and still relevant decades later.

Peter Norvig teaches advanced Common Lisp by reconstructing real artificial intelligence programs, showing how to build and debug large, robust software with attention to performance and efficiency. Patrick Collison recommends it on his bookshelf.

Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike explain the Unix idea of small programs that combine, then cover the shell, grep, sed, AWK, make and writing C programs. Tim O’Reilly prizes its account of the tools philosophy and the clarity of its prose.

Steve McConnell treats coding, debugging, detailed design and unit testing as the heart of development, with advice that runs from naming variables to deciding when a routine is worth writing. Santiago Basulto pairs it with SICP as a starting point on fundamentals.

Pete Goodliffe’s guide, as its subtitle says, is about the practice of writing excellent code. Lewis Smith, the developer behind BodyTracker, calls it the quickest way for a junior developer to grow into a senior one.

Peter Seibel asks fifteen programmers, among them Ken Thompson, Donald Knuth and Brendan Eich, how they learned to code, how they debug, which languages they like and how they spot talent. Santiago Basulto calls it full of inspiring stories.

Douglas Crockford, who specified JSON, cuts JavaScript down to its dependable core, praising functions, dynamic objects and object literals while warning against global variables. Auston Bunsen, a self-taught programmer, counts it among books that gave him practical skills.

Zed A. Shaw teaches Ruby through 52 exercises in which readers type every program by hand, fix their own errors and learn debugging, testing and object-oriented design along the way. Auston Bunsen lists it among the practical books that helped him.

Miran Lipovača uses his own drawings and playful examples to lead readers from Haskell syntax, recursion and type classes up to monads, lazy evaluation and zippers. Santiago Basulto enjoys it for the concepts behind a language he does not use daily.

Luke Welling and Laura Thomson teach PHP and MySQL together, then build working projects such as a shopping cart, web mail and user authentication. Scott Johnson credits it with teaching him database-backed web development when a software engineering job landed on him.

Martin Odersky, who designed Scala, teaches the language step by step with two coauthors, moving from its basic elements to functional programming on the Java Virtual Machine. Santiago Basulto values it for the ideas behind the language, even without daily Scala work.

Jon Bentley builds each essay around a small, nagging problem that working programmers hit, then walks through clever solutions and the design principles behind them. James Stanley liked how it trims machine resources and found many sudden moments of insight in it.

Mainly a company history, David Kushner’s account of id Software follows John Carmack, the programmer whose engines powered Doom and Quake, and John Romero. Chris Oliver calls it inspiring for any software developer who started out wanting to make games.

The founders of 37signals set out how their company builds web software simply, the process behind Basecamp and Ruby on Rails, though it is not a technical manual. Joan Boixados, a developer and bootstrapper himself, recommends it.

Mainly about hiring, Joel Spolsky’s short guide argues that one strong programmer can outproduce many ordinary ones and sets out his methods for screening resumes and interviewing developers. Adam Tornhill praises its honest, plainspoken advice and its humor.

Walter Isaacson’s history of the digital revolution begins with Ada Lovelace, an early pioneer of programming, and runs through Turing, Gates and Berners-Lee. Santiago Basulto says it showed him how hackers and revolutionaries shaped the tech world.

Paul Graham’s essays range over startups, wealth and why nerds are unpopular, but several deal directly with programming, including pieces on beauty in software design, open source and the future of programming languages.

Andreas M. Antonopoulos explains bitcoin for developers through code snippets on keys, addresses, wallets and transactions, alongside a broader introduction. Auston Bunsen found its explanation of wallet addresses directly useful for his company’s work on wallet generation.

Clive Thompson profiles programmers as a tribe, from celebrated elites to beginners, and describes a vocation built on logic, puzzle solving and a high tolerance for frustration. Kevin Kelly says it explains the culture of code to people who work with programmers.

Mainly about managing software projects, Frederick P. Brooks Jr.’s essays from IBM’s OS/360 effort explain why adding programmers to a late project delays it further and argue for prototyping and conceptual integrity. Jeff Bezos has recommended it.

Seymour Papert argues that children can master computers through the LOGO language and Turtle graphics, and that learning to program and debug can reshape how they learn every subject. Patrick Collison lists it on his bookshelf.

Four security and agile practitioners show how to build security into each stage of an agile development lifecycle, down to the code itself, with security testing built into each release. Louis Nyffenegger recommends it.

Mainly a cryptography reference, Bruce Schneier’s book walks programmers through protocols and algorithms such as RSA and DES, then supplies C source code and practical advice on random numbers and key security. Dominic Steil recommends it.

Mainly about management, Michael Lopp’s stories from Apple, Netscape and Borland cover hiring, one-on-ones and difficult projects among software engineers. Dave Child finds it full of useful advice for developers making the move into management.

Justin Richer and Antonio Sanso explain the OAuth 2 protocol by having readers build a simple client, authorization server and protected resource, covering tokens, OpenID Connect and common vulnerabilities, for readers with basic programming skill. Louis Nyffenegger recommends it.

Henrik Kniberg describes how a Swedish company of about 40 people combined Scrum with XP habits like pair programming, test-driven development and continuous builds, with tips on backlogs, sprints and testing. Mircea Scarlatescu recommends it.

G. Pascal Zachary follows David Cutler’s team of software engineers as they push hundreds of thousands of lines of code and many bugs toward a new operating system. Scott Johnson recommends it as a case study in building a product.

Mike Cohn’s guide is mainly about running Scrum in software teams, from structuring and scaling teams to metrics and distributed work. Nicolae Andronic, a former developer, values it for bringing order to the work of building a product.