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by larve 677 days ago
I actually find the quality of programming books to have starkly increased in the last decade. I find a lot of manning's and o'reilly's release to have a pretty long shelf-life.

For example, I really enjoyed and often go back to:

- https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/building-event-driven-m...

- https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-data-intensiv...

- https://www.manning.com/books/100-go-mistakes-and-how-to-avo...

- https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Performance-Brendan-Gregg/dp/...

And more recently:

- https://www.manning.com/books/build-a-large-language-model-f...

- https://www.manning.com/books/the-creative-programmer

- https://www.manning.com/books/the-programmers-brain

- https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Software-Addison-Wesley...

I also find books about specific technologies that indeed run the risk of being deprecated after a few years to be useful too

- https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/networking-and-kubernet...

- https://www.brendangregg.com/bpf-performance-tools-book.html

Furthermore, nothing keeps you from reading books about topics peripheral to computer science, say to keep up with the general vibes:

- https://www.amazon.com/Probabilistic-Machine-Learning-Introd...

- https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Learning-Foundations-Christopher...

- https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Abstraction-Exploration-Category-...

I find that all of these contribute significantly to my growth as an engineer.

2 comments

> I actually find the quality of programming books to have starkly increased in the last decade.

I suspect this might be a side-effect of programmers buying less books. The ratio of authors who write them because they really care instead of because they hope to make some bucks would then increase.

Just picked up a few of these for my summer vacation. Appreciate the recommendations!