[vitus]

Since you mention the Google SRE book, I'm curious if you've read the Google SWE book (and if so, what your thoughts are).

https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book has a link to a PDF copy.

I've read through about... half of it; at least from my perspective (as a current software engineer at Google with experience with most of the systems / processes outlined in the book), a lot of it is philosophical about the "why" of software engineering.

[eatonphil]

I've read through half of it as well. I think it's pretty good but poorly edited somehow because of how long it's taken me to get through even just the first half.

So ultimately I don't think it will break my top list even when I finish it.

[vitus]

That's definitely a fair assessment.

It reads like a lot of self-contained chunks (~15-20 pages per chapter, for most chapters), but right around the halfway mark, there's 100 pages on testing philosophy, which is a slog. Don't get me wrong -- testing is a fundamental aspect of modern software engineering! But I suspect that's why I got to that point and then put it down for a few months.

To harp on the testing section some more, there's some amount of redundancy across the sections. For instance, the unit testing chapter has a page on testing state rather than interactions, and then it's followed by 5 more pages expanding on the same subject at the end of the next chapter (test doubles).

It's a shame, really, since I think chapters 20+ contain some of the more technically interesting topics (yes, including another testing section -- CI!).