There is a wealth of knowledge about our industry, and there are many voices to which we should listen. Below are a few books and articles that have stood out to me over the years. This is a list that I will add to over time.

Please contact me if you think there’s something worth mentioning here.

BOOKS

The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist
by Fred Brooks

Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction, Second Edition
by Steve McConnell

Engineering and the Mind’s Eye
by Eugene Ferguson

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
by Charles Petzold

Clean Architecture: A Craftsman’s Guide to Software Structure and Design
by Robert Martin

Applied Software Measurement: Global Analysis of Productivity and Quality
by Capers Jones

Building Evolutionary Architectures: Support Constant Change
by Neal Ford

Software Fundamentals: Collected Papers by David L. Parnas
by Daniel M. Hoffman and David M. Weiss

A Philosophy of Software Design
by John Ousterhout

A Whole New Engineer
by David E. Goldberg and Mark Sommerville

The Problem With Software: Why Smart Engineers Write Bad Code
by Adam Barr

Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It
by Andy Oram & Greg Wilson

Righting Software
by Juval Löwy

The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change)
by Clayton M. Christensen

ARTICLES

On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules
by David Parnas

Designing Software for Ease of Extension and Contraction
by David Parnas

Why We Should Build Software Like We Build Houses (Wired)
by Leslie Lamport

The Coming Software Apocalypse (The Atlantic)
by James Somers

Why Software is Eating the World (Andreessen Horowitz)
by Marc Andreessen

From the Field: Escaping Appland (Iasa Global)
by Michael “Monty” Montgomery

Design Stamina Hypothesis
by Martin Fowler

Is High Quality Software Worth the Cost?
by Martin Fowler

A Cautionary Tale on Microservices from Uber
by Adam Gluck

Are We Really Engineers?
by Hillel Wayne

268% Higher Failure Rates for Agile Software Projects, Study Finds
from Engprax

Let’s Talk

Drop me a note and we can talk by email, phone, or over coffee. I enjoy making time to meet folks and learn more about their challenges, discoveries, and successes.