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r/ExperiencedDevs · 2021

Most-mentioned books in r/ExperiencedDevs during 2021

This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/ExperiencedDevs within the published source unit for 2021. Counts come from the reconciled subreddit-by-month matrix; a source unit may be a bounded sample.

39
Books ranked
233
Tracked mentions in 2021
Sort by upvotes = sum of comment scores on recognized mentions
Cover of Designing Data-Intensive Applications #1

Designing Data-Intensive Applications

Martin Kleppmann

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

31 in 2021
Cover of Clean Code #2

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.

20 in 2021
Cover of The Manager's Path #3

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.

15 in 2021
Cover of Cracking the Coding Interview #4

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.

13 in 2021
Cover of The Mythical Man-Month #5

The Mythical Man-Month

Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

Fred Brooks managed IBM's late-1960s OS/360 project, then wrote the book explaining why adding more programmers only made it later.

13 in 2021
Cover of The Phoenix Project #6

The Phoenix Project

Gene Kim

A struggling IT VP inherits a doomed project, a company on the edge of collapse, and one coworker who has quietly become the company's entire bottleneck.

12 in 2021
Cover of The Pragmatic Programmer #7

The Pragmatic Programmer

Andy Hunt

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

12 in 2021
Cover of Working Effectively with Legacy Code #8

Working Effectively with Legacy Code

Michael C. Feathers

A consultant walks into a five-year-old codebase with zero tests and a deadline, and writes the manual for surviving exactly that.

11 in 2021
Cover of Accelerate #9

Accelerate

Nicole Forsgren

Four researchers measure what actually makes software teams fast, and the findings keep getting cited against companies mistaking speed for shortcuts.

10 in 2021
Cover of Design Patterns #10

Design Patterns

Erich Gamma

Four authors catalog twenty-three recurring object-oriented problems in 1994 and hand every future code review the same argument to have.

10 in 2021
Cover of Clean Architecture #11

Clean Architecture

Robert C. Martin

Robert Martin's rule: business logic sits at the center of the system, frameworks and databases plug in at the edges, never the other way around.

9 in 2021
Cover of Code Complete #12

Code Complete

Steve McConnell

Steve McConnell's seven-hundred-page argument that construction, not design or testing, is where most software quality is actually won or lost.

8 in 2021
Cover of Refactoring #13

Refactoring

Martin Fowler

Martin Fowler's method for restructuring code's internals without anyone outside noticing that anything changed at all.

7 in 2021
Cover of System Design Interview #14

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.

7 in 2021
Cover of A Philosophy of Software Design #15

A Philosophy of Software Design

John Ousterhout

A Stanford professor who invented Tcl spends two hundred pages arguing that hiding complexity behind well-designed modules beats writing more, smaller methods.

6 in 2021
Cover of Domain-Driven Design #16

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.

6 in 2021
Cover of Peopleware #17

Peopleware

Tom DeMarco

DeMarco and Lister time how long it takes a programmer to get back into the zone after one interruption, then build a whole management argument around that number.

6 in 2021
Cover of Staff Engineer #18

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.

4 in 2021
Cover of The Clean Coder #19

The Clean Coder

Robert C. Martin

Uncle Bob's professionalism manual: say no to bad estimates, refuse death marches, and work the 40 hours then study on your own time.

4 in 2021
Cover of Elements of Programming Interviews in Python #20

Elements of Programming Interviews in Python

Adnan Aziz

Three hundred coding-interview problems, an online judge, and a study guide, all built to answer a shorthand Reddit already assumes you know: EPI.

3 in 2021
Cover of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs #21

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Harold Abelson

Six chapters into Scheme, you're writing an interpreter for a language you invented an hour ago.

3 in 2021
Cover of Head First Design Patterns #22

Head First Design Patterns

Eric Freeman

A junior dev dreads every requirement change until a book full of cartoon ducks and strategy patterns rewires how they see the problem.

2 in 2021
Cover of Software Engineering at Google #23

Software Engineering at Google

Titus Winters

Google engineers document how a 25,000-person org ships software that has to last decades — the distinction between 'programmer' and 'engineer' is the whole argument.

2 in 2021
Cover of The C Programming Language #24

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 2021
Cover of The DevOps Handbook #25

The DevOps Handbook

Gene Kim

Why a company doing 10,000 deploys a day breaks less often than one doing four a year, and what it takes to get from the second number to the first.

2 in 2021