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r/gamedev · 2023

Most-mentioned books in r/gamedev during 2023

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

15
Books ranked
45
Tracked mentions in 2023
Sort by upvotes = sum of comment scores on recognized mentions
Cover of Theory of Fun for Game Design #1

Theory of Fun for Game Design

Raph Koster

Raph Koster argues that fun is just the brain's name for the feeling of learning something new, whether the game is Tetris or chess.

7 in 2023
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.

6 in 2023
Cover of Game Engine Architecture #3

Game Engine Architecture

Jason Gregory

A former Naughty Dog engineer walks the full stack of a shipped 3D engine, memory allocator to renderer to gameplay systems, in one very long textbook.

6 in 2023
Cover of Design Patterns #4

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.

5 in 2023
Cover of Cracking the Coding Interview #5

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.

4 in 2023
Cover of The Mythical Man-Month #6

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.

4 in 2023
Cover of Code Complete #7

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.

3 in 2023
Cover of The Pragmatic Programmer #8

The Pragmatic Programmer

Andy Hunt

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

3 in 2023
Cover of A Philosophy of Software Design #9

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.

1 in 2023
Cover of Domain-Driven Design #10

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.

1 in 2023
Cover of Grokking Algorithms #11

Grokking Algorithms

Aditya Y. Bhargava

A cartoon-illustrated walkthrough of binary search, sorting, and graphs aimed at people who bounced off Introduction to Algorithms.

1 in 2023
Cover of Introduction to Algorithms #12

Introduction to Algorithms

Thomas H. Cormen

A course syllabus gets posted, and a Redditor recognizes it as nothing but this book's chapter headings in disguise.

1 in 2023
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.

1 in 2023
Cover of The Art of Computer Programming #14

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.

1 in 2023
Cover of The Design of Everyday Things #15

The Design of Everyday Things

Don Norman

A cognitive scientist argues that when you can't open a door or use a stove, the door and stove are broken — not you.

1 in 2023