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