Must Read Books for Software Engineers – Better Developer

To become software development is not so easy, you always needed to up-to-date with current trends. As a software developer, you always need to educate yourself to incorporate the latest best practices into the software engineering processes.

To get become a good engineer is as much about reading code as it is about writing it. Learning is a lifelong process, and in today’s world we have lots digital resources for learning like videos, artificial intelligence, blogs, etc. But learning from the book has different from all of these resources.

In this article we have listed some of the very useful best books for software developer.

Code Complete (Developer Best Practices)

Code Complete 2 by Steve McConnell’s is one of the practice guides for developer. The second addition of code complete is fully updated with leading-edge practice and also added 100’s of new code. This book focused on topics such as design, coding, debugging, and testing.

Highlights of the Book:

• Design for minimum complexity & maximum creativity.
• Reap the benefits of collaborative development.
• Apply defensive programming techniques to reduce and flush out errors.
• Exploit opportunities to refactor—or evolve—code, and do it safely.
• Use construction practices that are right-weight for your project.
• Debug problems quickly and effectively.
• Resolve critical construction issues early and correctly.
• Build quality into the beginning, middle, and end of your project.

The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers

This Book is presented by software expert Robert C. Martin. This book focused on estimating and coding to refactoring and testing. Robert C. Martine introduces the disciplines, techniques, tools, and practices of true software craftsmanship.

Highlights of the Book:

• What it means to behave as a true software craftsman
• How to deal with conflict, tight schedules, and unreasonable managers
• How to get into the flow of coding, and get past writer’s block
• How to handle unrelenting pressure and avoid burnout
• How to combine enduring attitudes with new development paradigms
• How to manage your time, and avoid blind alleys, marshes, bogs, and swamps
• How to foster environments where programmers and teams can thrive
• When to say ‘No’–and how to say it
• When to say ‘Yes’–and what yes really means

Cracking the Coding Interview 6th Edition

Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions helps you to crack the interview. In this book you find the 100’s of software engineer questions and the ways to uncover the hints and hidden details in a question.

In this book you will learn how to break down a problem into manageable chunks, development techniques to unstick yourself when stuck and practice on 189 interview questions and solutions.

Highlights of the Book:

• 189 programming interview questions, ranging from the basics to the trickiest algorithm problems.
• A walk-through of how to derive each solution, so that you can learn how to get there yourself.
• Hints on how to solve each of the 189 questions, just like what you would get in a real interview.
• Five proven strategies to tackle algorithm questions, so that you can solve questions you haven’t seen.
• Extensive coverage of essential topics, such as big O time, data structures, and core algorithms.
• A behind the scenes look at how top companies like Google and Facebook hire developers.
• Techniques to prepare for and ace the soft side of the interview: behavioral questions.
• For interviewers and companies: details on what makes a good interview question and hiring process.

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code edition second written by Martin Fowler’s. In this book you will able to learn the Refactoring and existing code optimization, and how to enhance software maintainability. You also find the catalog of refactoring, and include JavaScript code examples, as well as new functional examples that demonstrate refactoring without classes.

Highlights of the Book:

• Understand the process and general principles of refactoring.
• Quickly apply useful refactoring to make a program easier to comprehend and change.
• Recognize “bad smells” in code that signal opportunities to refactor.
• Explore the refactoring, each with explanations, motivation, mechanics, and simple examples.
• Build solid tests for your refactoring.
• Recognize trade-offs and obstacles to refactoring.

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture is written in direct response to the stiff challenges that face enterprise application developers.

The author (Martin Fowler), noticed that despite changes in technology–from Smalltalk to CORBA to Java to .NET–the same basic design ideas can be adapted and applied to solve common problems. With the help of an expert group of contributors, Martin distills over forty recurring solutions into patterns. The result is an indispensable handbook of solutions that are applicable to any enterprise application platform.

This book is actually two books in one. The first section is a short tutorial on developing enterprise applications, which you can read from start to finish to understand the scope of the book’s lessons. The next section, the bulk of the book, is a detailed reference to the patterns themselves. 

Highlights of the Book:

• Dividing an enterprise application into layers.
• The major approaches to organizing business logic.
• An in-depth treatment of mapping between objects and relational databases.
• Using Model-View-Controller to organize a Web presentation.
• Handling concurrency for data that spans multiple transactions.
• Designing distributed object interfaces.

Documenting Software Architectures:

Documenting Software Architectures: Views and Beyond (SEI Series in Software Engineering) 2nd Edition provides the most complete and current guidance, independent of language or notation, on how to capture an architecture in a commonly understandable form.

The book features rules for sound documentation, the goals and strategies of documentation, architectural views and styles, documentation for software interfaces and software behavior, and templates for capturing and organizing information to generate a coherent package.

Highlights of the Book:

• Coverage of architectural styles such as service-oriented architectures, multi-tier architectures, and data models
• Guidance for documentation in an Agile development environment
• Deeper treatment of documentation of rationale, reflecting best industrial practices
• Improved templates, reflecting years of use and feedback, and more documentation layout options
• A new, comprehensive example (available online), featuring documentation of a Web-based service-oriented system
• Reference guides for three important architecture documentation languages: UML, AADL, and SySML