r/cscareerquestions · 2023

Most-mentioned books in r/cscareerquestions during 2023

This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/cscareerquestions within the published source unit for 2023. Counts come from the reconciled subreddit-by-month matrix; a source unit may be a bounded sample.

Books ranked

112

Tracked mentions in 2023

Sort by upvotes = sum of comment scores on recognized mentions

Cracking the Coding Interview

Gayle Laakmann McDowell

The book credited with inventing the modern coding interview, argued about like it's also on trial for it.

29 in 2023

Designing Data-Intensive Applications

Martin Kleppmann

Martin Kleppmann walks backend engineers through every database, queue, and consistency tradeoff they'll eventually get paged about.

17 in 2023

Clean Code

Robert C. Martin

Robert Martin's case that unreadable functions are a discipline failure, not an inevitability, argued one renamed variable and one extracted method at a time.

11 in 2023

System Design Interview

Alex Xu

You get handed a whiteboard and forty-five minutes to design something like TinyURL, and this is the crash course for surviving that conversation.

9 in 2023

Staff Engineer

Will Larson

A senior engineer hits the ceiling of writing code alone and has to learn how influence works without a manager's title attached to it.

8 in 2023

The Pragmatic Programmer

Andy Hunt

Two working programmers write down the shop habits senior engineers use so junior ones stop reinventing them badly.

6 in 2023

The Manager's Path

Camille Fournier

A software engineer becomes a tech lead, then a manager, then a director, and the book insists on teaching you each rung separately.

4 in 2023

An Elegant Puzzle

Will Larson

Will Larson treats engineering management as a systems problem, headcount and career ladders, and r/ExperiencedDevs keeps filing it next to Designing Data-Intensive Applications.

3 in 2023

Modern Software Engineering

David Farley

Dave Farley argues the real gap between a 10x engineer and everyone else is how much rework they eliminate before it ever happens.

3 in 2023

#10

The Effective Engineer

Edmond Lau

Edmond Lau argues the engineers everyone calls 10x aren't working ten times the hours; they're choosing higher-impact work, chapter by chapter through why.

3 in 2023

#11

Domain-Driven Design

Eric Evans

An interviewer asks if you've read Domain-Driven Design, then pivots to recursive Fibonacci when the answer gets complicated.

2 in 2023

#12

Effective Java

Joshua Bloch

Joshua Bloch turns fifty-plus Java gotchas into itemized rules, and one of them — favor composition over inheritance — outgrew the book entirely.

2 in 2023

#13

The Art of Computer Programming

Donald E. Knuth

Four volumes of algorithms and combinatorics Donald Knuth started in 1962 and still hasn't finished, cited more often than it's actually read.

2 in 2023

#14

The C Programming Language

Brian W. Kernighan

Two authors write the book that becomes 'K&R,' and forty years later Reddit still uses it as shorthand for programmers who had to know everything themselves.

2 in 2023