Reads Worth Their Weight When Moving

This list doesn’t encompass everything I’ve read, mostly just things I’ve read to pick up new skills and my recommendations.

It has two sections:

• The Good Stuff
• Save Your Money

There’s a gray area between the two list, things I wouldn’t actively recommend but didn’t strongly dislike either. I don’t bother including those.

The Good Stuff

Stuff I recommend divided by category.

• Design and Concepts
• Technical Skills
• Fun

Design and Concepts

Books that talk about abstract concepts, system design, and idea worms that’ll have you thinking differently.

• The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Raymond)

  • The classic scoop on why open-source is kick-butt.

• The Clean Code Series

  • These get a lot of flack for being too dogmatic, but I still consider them required reading. The best advice I heard was, read and ingest the ideas, then “let them go.”
  • Clean Code (Martin)
  • Clean Architecture (Martin)
  • The Clean Coder
    • Not a page turner like Clean Code and Clean Architecture, but glad I listened to it.
    • Good as an audiobook.
  • Clean Agile
    • Listening as audiobook. Seems more like a memoir. I honestly did not absorb this well.

• The Pragmatic Programmer (Thomas and Hunt)

• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Gamma et al.)

  • Not particularly fun, and a little old, but still the OG source for code design patterns.

• Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Kleppmann)

  • Interesting examination on things like relational databases vs. no-sql DBs, reliability vs. access, stream vs. batch.

• The Twelve Factor App (?)

  • Not a book, but a must-read one pager.

• The DevOps Handbook (Allspaw et al.)

• Infrastructure as Code 2nd edition (Kief Morris)

• Network Warrior(Gary A. Donahue)

• Observability Engineering(Charity Majors)

  • Maybe a little more verbose that it needs to be.

• Building Microservices (Sam Newman)

• How to Win Friends and influence People

  • Good as an Audio book.

• Principles of Web Design

  • Great primer on web page design, SEO, and page element.

• Building Your Storybrand

  • Simple message, well packaged, method of developing your brand.

• Algorithms to Live by

  • Loved it, a new way of thinking about things I encounter daily.

• Principles of Web Design

  • Loved that it’s essentially a picture book, should have just stole from the library

• Architecture Patterns with Python: Enabling Test-Driven Development, Domain-Driven Design, and Event-Driven Microservices

  • Wish it talked about Django more

• Monolith to Microservices: Evolutionary Patterns to Transform Your Monolith

  • OK, but really enjoyed this books younger (bigger) brother (below)

• Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems

  • I actually come back to this book as a reference, I don’t even write microservices

Technical Skills

These were books I read to pick up a new skill.

• Unit Testing: Principles, Practices and Patterns (Khorikov)

  • I really appreciated the section on identifying what makes a quality unit test and doesn’t just push the idea that you should have 100% code coverage.

• Learning TypeScript

  • Just as long as it needs to be and easy. Good as e-book.

• Python Concurrency with asyncio (Matthew Fowler)

  • A good explanation of how to use asyncio, directly helped me with a project at work.

• Docker Deep Dive (Poulton)

  • Well-written coverage of how Docker works under the hood, not a full API/CLI reference but really takes Docker from the abstract to the concrete. Cheap, and gets updates frequently. Good as e-book.

• [] Secrets of a JavaScript Ninja—2nd Ed. (Resig, et. al.)

  • Haven’t had a change to finish yet, but so far I’m liking the deep-diving nature of the book.

• The Kubernetes Book - 2022 Ed. (Nigel Poulton)

  • Great, up-to-date, core concepts of K8. Good as an ebook.

• The Rust Book

  • The self-proclaimed classic intro. Good as an ebook. Will make any programmer think.

• Go Web Programming (Chang)

  • This was a great intro to web dev for me, and my first intro to Golang.

• Rust for Rustaceans (Gjengset)

  • Helped me start contributing quality code, as a collaborator, to my first open source Rust project.

• Learning PHP, MySQL & JavaScript

  • This one is on here for sentimental reasons, one of my first hands-on introductions to web development.

• [] Node.js Design Patterns (Casciaro and Mammino)

  • In progress, but I like it so far.

• The C Programming Language (Kernigan and Ritchie)

  • On the back burner, not using C a lot right now.

• The Go Programming Language (Donovan and Kernighan)

  • If Kernighan wrote The C programming Language like this, I see why it’s a classic. Fantastic explanations.

• Test Driven Development (M. Fowler)

  • Classic! But I personally prefer Unit Testing: Principles, Practices and Patterns.

• Cloud Native Go

  • Great intuitive bits on unique(ish) parts of Go like interfaces and goroutines with a primer on different types of cloud computing

• Pro Git (Chacon & Straub)

  • Good (free) comprehensive guide everyone who uses Git should read.

• The Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook (Nemeth +)

  • Not a page turner, but good to have on hand.

• Introducing Python - Modern Computing in Simple Packages (Lubanovic)

  • Good as an all around reference for the language

• Object-Oriented Python: Master OOP by Building Games and GUIs (Kalb)

  • A great intro to OOP for pythonistas that helped me. Solidified the concept of programming to an interfaces for me.

• JavaScript—The Definitive Guide (Flanagan)

  • This is a questionable inclusion, it focuses on the language but includes little about using it with Node.js or in the browser.

• Kubernetes Best Practices (Burns et al)

  • This is a slow read.

• Terraform: up and running (Brikman)

  • Seems a little long, it meanders into thing it should just assume the reader knows, but I like the writing style.

• Web Security for Developers: Real Threats, Practical Defense

  • A short, but practical primer. I enjoyed it because it’s a level deeper than common documentation goes

Fun

Fun stuff I just couldn’t leave off the list.

• Team of Rivals - Unabridged (Goodwin)

  • Good as Audiobook

• The Wright Brothers (David McCullough)

• 1776 (David McCullough)

• Storm of Steel (Ernst Jünger)

• How the Internet Happened (Brian McCullough)

  • I enjoyed this romp through recent history, but maybe it’s not for everyone.

• The Phoenix Project (Kim, Behr, & Spafford)

  • Oddly entertaining narrative on why devops is beneficial. Would only do as an Audiobook.

• The Lord of the Rings (I, II, and III) (J. R. R. Tolkien)

  • Check out the Andy Serkis narrated audiobook, a treat for the ears.

• The Hobbit (J. R. R. Tolkien)

• GOT (Martin)

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (D. Adams)

• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (S. Larsson)

• The Guns of August (Tuchman and Massie)

  • Something history buffs will enjoy, not for everyone.

Save your money

This is books I usually felt that I could have done without, or maybe there was a better place to find the information.

• Most books published by Packt. Their price tags and title are usually enticing but I’ve yet to read one that I thought either didn’t deliver on content, or there was a better alternative.

• Python for Devops (Gift et al.)

  • Couldn’t even finish, just ramblings with little useful info on using python for devops or automation that can’t be found in a python 101 book.

• Learning React (Banks and Porcello)

  • Plenty of technical mistakes, they must not have run the code they put in the book, and already outdated.

• Docker for Developers (Bullington-McGuire et al)

  • Not bad necessarily, but not worth the cash. I wish I had just stuck with Docker Deep Dive.

• Wicked Cool Shell Scripts (Taylor)

  • I have mixed feelings about this one; the shell scripts may be cool, but that doesn’t mean they’re useful.

• Node.js Cookbook (Griggs)

  • It’s not bad but offers little material that you couldn’t just pick up from online docs.

• Think Java: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist

  • I only take issue with the title, which should be “basics of programming with Java.” Not bad if that’s what you’re looking for.

• CPython Internals: Your Guide to the Python 3 Interpreter

  • I wanted this to be less abstract. It’s enough for someone more curious, but I wanted more.

• Microservice APIs: Using Python, Flask, FastAPI, OpenAPI and more(Jost Peralta)

  • Way more beginner oriented than it should be since its targeted audience is people using/learning microservices.

• [] Distributed Systems with Node.js (Hunter)

  • I would recommend getting Node.js Design Patterns instead.

• Boost your Django DX (A. Johnson)

  • While I really appreciate Adam Johnson’s work in the Django community, I found the price to be a little steep for how basic the content was.

• Speed Up your Django Tests (A. Johnson)

  • While I really appreciate Adam Johnson’s work in the Django community, I found the price to be a little steep for how basic the content was.

In the Backlog

Books I want to read, but never seem to make it to the top of the list.

• Site Reliability Engineering (Murphy, Beyer, et el)

  • This is a slow read. Not sure if I will ever get to this.

• A short History of Everything

• Effective C-2nd Ed. (Seacord)