HACKER Q&A
📣 noob_eng

Book recommendations that made you a better engineer overall?


The type of engineering doesn't matter. It may be electrical, mechanical, biomedical, computer, literally anything.

"Engineering is the purposeful use of science" - a quote I heard somewhere and have forgot who said it.

Name some books that made you a better engineer. The books need not necessarily be from your field. You may have drawn inspiration from a related or a non-related subject. E.g.: learning some form of mathematics may make you a better programmer.

Also mention a line of two about why the book has a special place for you.

  👤 surprisetalk Accepted Answer ✓
• Smalltalk-80 : http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook....

• Godel, Escher, Bach : https://www.amazon.com/Gödel-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0...

• Crafting Interpreters : https://www.amazon.com/Crafting-Interpreters-Robert-Nystrom/...

• SICP : https://www.amazon.com/Structure-Interpretation-Computer-Pro...

👤 elevanation
How to Win Friends and Influence People: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...

Because in the long run, it's not just about having great ideas, it's about collaborating with other people, and convincing those people about your great ideas.

👤 dranudin
"Finite Elements Using Maple", "The finite element method displayed" - I am a mechanical engineer by education. These are two of the first books that made me understand finite element simulations, more than a decade ago. By programming these simulations I started to write code almost every day. Today I work as a software engineer and it's great!
👤 avinassh
Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA) - https://dataintensive.net/
👤 2rsf
Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/accelerate/978145719143...

There are a lot of books on good practices, this one has proofs and research included

👤 austin-cheney
DOM Scripting - https://www.amazon.com/DOM-Scripting-Design-JavaScript-Docum...

XML Schema - https://www.amazon.com/Definitive-XML-Schema-Charles-Goldfar...

You don’t have to be a slave to some framework to do frontend web work. You can actually learn how these technologies actually work.

👤 sangpal
Code Complete - great for understanding how to actually go about building large scale programs effectively