r/webdev · 2021

Most-mentioned books in r/webdev during 2021

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

Books ranked

Tracked mentions in 2021

Sort by upvotes = sum of comment scores on recognized mentions

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.

4 in 2021

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.

3 in 2021

You Don't Know JS

Kyle Simpson

A front-end director tells a career-change hopeful to stop skimming tutorials and actually learn how JavaScript works underneath React.

3 in 2021

Eloquent JavaScript

Marijn Haverbeke

Marijn Haverbeke's free JavaScript book teaches closures and recursion, then has its own author admit he wouldn't wish a game-programming career on anyone.

2 in 2021

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.

2 in 2021

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.

2 in 2021

A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

Barbara Oakley

A woman who flunked high school math writes the study-skills book self-taught programmers keep citing to explain why a walk outside unsticks a hard problem.

1 in 2021

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 2021

Accelerate

Nicole Forsgren

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

1 in 2021

#10

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.

1 in 2021

#11

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.

1 in 2021

#12

Designing Data-Intensive Applications

Martin Kleppmann

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

1 in 2021

#13

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 2021

#14

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.

1 in 2021

#15

Test-Driven Development: By Example

Kent Beck

Kent Beck writes a failing test, makes it pass, then refactors — and shows you the keystrokes, not the theory.

1 in 2021

#16

The 4-Hour Workweek

Timothy Ferriss

A guy quits his cubicle, outsources his own job to a virtual assistant, and starts running his business from wherever he wants.

1 in 2021

#17

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.

1 in 2021

#18

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.

1 in 2021

#19

The Pragmatic Programmer

Andy Hunt

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

1 in 2021

#20

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.

1 in 2021