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Ask HN: What's the ONE book I should read about software engineering?

by nonasktell on 10/30/22, 8:23 PM with 3 comments

I'm a twenty something, mostly self taught software engineer/dev(started as a kid), a bit of a jack of all trades, but mostly doing fullstack JS development for a startup right now.

Mostly have a hacker mindset I guess, resourceful, autonomous, able to find messy quick fixes to huge problems, I guess I could code pretty much anything that is actually feasible, but I'm not really the kind of guy who could write Fizzbuzz Enterprise Edition without loosing my mind.

This can create some tensions with management.

I don't have much time right now, if I had to read ONE book about software engineering, what would you suggest?

My mid/long term goal would be freelancing/bootstrapping/entrepreneurship

by Jtsummers on 10/30/22, 11:40 PM
If you really only have time for one book, The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald Weinberg. Silver anniversary edition, it keeps the vast majority of the text intact and adds commentary between chapters by Weinberg.
by mardiyah on 10/30/22, 8:49 PM
there's none, try few
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software https://geni.us/GQSU
Refactoring Improving the Design of Existing Code https://geni.us/u2s6pK
by zhxshen on 10/30/22, 8:45 PM
http://files.catwell.info/misc/mirror/the-unix-programming-e...