Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?
Most of the highly recommended books for software developers are about 400 pages. Sometimes I want to start and finish a book in a weekend and 400 is too much for me. Which books under 200 pages do you recommend to software developers?
Bonus: Best non-tech books under 200 pages https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/19194.Best_Books_Under_200_Pages
105 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadVery well-written. At 190 pages, quite likely finish-able in a weekend. But if you get 70% of the way through it, that is still very valuable. It makes sense as an underlying set of principles that explain why you would use design patterns.
Beyond his credibility as the creator of Tcl, in the talk he gave at Google about the book [1] he describes the course he teaches that was the inspiration for the book. The course is to write a word processor with a team and extended it with features over the semester, swapping codebases between teams so occasionally you have to work with other's code. Essentially the largest possible code project you can fit in one semester. Along the way, Ousterhout will give a deep code review of the each project. I think it must be very insightful to see the same project implemented so many ways, and to see what works in terms of simplicity and extensibility.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmSAYlu0NcY
"This book does not consider functional programming, or the fact that terrible software in modern times is often the result of layers of incorrect abstraction that are often induced by the overuse of "object oriented" (OO) programming techniques. Instead, it takes OO programming for granted as being a good thing (visible in its preferences for two OO languages, C++ and Java), and then it reasons in that domain, making it totally uninteresting to many potential readers. The book also assumes that formal design doesn't work (he calls it "waterfall"), and takes alternatives for granted. I doubt the author is even aware of his inherent bias, but it is incredibly strong."
Does anyone here agree or disagree with these points?
The text isn’t about implementation or paradigm. It’s about things applicable in software design in general. For example, good interfaces are deep, rather than shallow. The examples of narrow interfaces are in Java because they were good examples. If you have to instantiate 5, 6 objects to use an interface, the interface is not deep. But if you had to do the same thing in a CLI interface or a GUI, it’s the same idea. You could apply the same ideas to functional APIs.
Although I think that the book provides a lot of very valuable insights, I missed a more differentiated view of the concepts presented in the book. For example, in chapter 4 ("Modules should be deep") Ousterhout dismisses the use of small classes and methods. He argues that using many small classes and methods makes the system as a whole more complex because many little pieces have to be managed. I completely agree with that statement. But only under the assumption that software systems are static and never-changing. If we consider software systems as ever-changing, I would argue that using smaller pieces often provides the flexibility necessary for maintaining large systems.
That's a very good point. Designing small components probably requires more effort and can also cause a lot of harm if done incorrectly.
Prior HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12120752
It is better to provide a clear and memorable picture that is only slightly wrong than a hedging and muddled picture that is still slightly wrong.
https://www.amazon.com/Apprenticeship-Patterns-Guidance-Aspi...
> are you spending literally the entire weekend doing nothing by reading?
For the most part, yes.
> Do you take breaks?
Yes.
> Do you speed read?
No.
> Do you take notes?
Usually I take notes on things that jump out at me while I read. I don't take a lot of notes. Maybe one note every ten pages or so.
> What's your strategy?
Stay off of reddit and hacker news. Instead of spending time on the internet in the mornings or if I feel board, I reach for the book I am trying to finish and I keep my phone somewhere it can't distract me. Very tempting to get distracted and start looking at your phone. Before you know it you're five pages deep on reddit and half an hour is gone.
Another thing I do pretty frequently is flip to the next chapter and tell my self, only x pages to until I get to that chapter. It helps me stay focused and motivated.
Some are easy to binge cause they keep your attention
Others are a slough
Huckelberry Finn, which is a pretty complicated book given all the dialect and the ideas it presents, used to take me about 8-9 hours. I recently read it over a period of 2 days in ebook reader during pauses in a pretty heavy schedule of taking care of kids, cleaning house etc.
If I really push I can do a 350 page book in one day of about eight hours.
I do take breaks if I have a need such as eating, or the rest room.
I do not speed read. My strategy is to sit down, read, and get done at some point.
Non fiction is a bit different, and depends wildly on the topic, how familiar I am with the topic, and how dry the book is.
I also enjoy nonfiction podcasts, and talks which I play at 1.5x speed while doing things like bike riding, or cleaning.
I don't think there's a particular reason to read a book in one weekend. For me the outside world kinda just fades away as I do it like it does when you binge a lot of things. But if you don't have the time or that ability, shorter chunks, even a chapter a night or splitting it over multiple weekends seems like a good idea to me.
Listening to a podcast or audio book while doing monotonous tasks is both life changing and addictive.
The side effect being that I am able to track things much better now at that speed and I can bang through podcasts much easier now that I've acclimated to the faster speeds. Really recommend this to anyone who also listens to a lot of podcasts or audio books, it's a good hack to get more content in.
For me, fiction books are easy when getting into it. It's like watching a movie unfold inside the head. It's simply difficult to put a good fiction book down.
Non-fiction in general is not as fast to process. But, sometimes books have a lot of redundancy, explaining things already explained, repeating the same thing over and over, and repeating the same thing over and over, and explaining things already explained, and so on. I just skip that without remorse.
I speed read when it makes sense (for example, when finding some information fast in a mass of unknown text). I take notes in different ways, sometimes use a mindmap and use different techniques to analyze and remember.
I take some breaks, too, but they are not scheduled nor regular. The ideal break is a short walk outside, but this is often not practical.
Doing 350 pages of non-fiction in a normal weekend is hard, unless I'm alone without family, eat takeaway and have some background knowledge of the subject and can skip some parts since I already know it. For something completely new, maybe 3-4 days is more accurate an estimate.
Doing 350 pages of fiction is very fast, specially if it's in my native language. Other languages are a bit slower to process.
Last but not least, if it turns out that the author is stupid and/or the content is rubbish, then reading the book becomes hard work. Therefore, I think one has to have some form of interest in the book as well to motivate reading the book at all and to be open to consuming the book effectively. For me, this interest is actually one of the key things for consuming a book. For example, once I had to stop reading one of George Friedman's books for the aforementioned reasons; thinking "this is such bullshit" after every few pages is not a good signal.
One way to build up this interest towards a book is to create, beforehand, some questions which the book should somehow answer.
Hope this helps and gives you some ideas.
Very pragmatic and approachable for us developers who may not have much idea about design. If you want 'good enough' design for your side project but don't want to use templates, this is the book you'd want to read. The book is a bit expensive though.
https://github.com/MostlyAdequate/mostly-adequate-guide
Compiler Construction https://inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/CompilerConstruction/inde... How to build a compiler from scractch (if you read German, there is an even more concise book by him, "Übersetzerbau)".
Project Oberon https://inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/index.html How to build a personal workstation including all software from scratch.
Classic MIT text. Pretty dense feeling though, my brain melts after a chapter or two at a time
Amongst my many weaknesses, UI is the weakest.
Grokking Algorithms An Illustrated Guide For Programmers and Other Curious People (235 pages)
I just downloaded a free book. In the intro it says:
> Free forever. Syncfusion will be working to produce books on several topics. The books will always be free. Any updates we publish will also be free.
A short handbook on developing high quality software in the DevOps world.
Solid marketing foundations are probably one of the more important skills that separate the good from the great practitioners.
Everything else on this thread I've read isn't a weekend. It's a careful study.
I find law 12. the law of line extension speaks to the current apple product line. There used to be a single phone they made, today there are 4 to choose from.
https://neildavidson.com/downloads/dont-just-roll-the-dice-2...
Kernighan also co-authored a (imo) really great book with Rob Pike (once an assistant of Penn & Teller [3]) called "The Practice of Programming" [4]. Unfortunately, this one is a bit over the 200 page limit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Programming_St...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SUkrR7ZfTA
[3] https://youtu.be/z4iVAcYyWN0?t=180
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming
Another great book on FP is "The Functional Approach to Programming" [2], which is a bit like SICP but using Caml (OCaml without the O) instead of Scheme.
[1] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~lp15/MLbook/pub-details.html
[2] http://pauillac.inria.fr/cousineau-mauny/main.html
I’m cheating a bit because this is only under 200 pages because it’s a work in progress.
It’s such an easy read, but does a great job at explaining the value of functional programming for building real-world applications without getting bogged down in monads, currying, and complex type systems.
Once it’s complete, I’d make it required reading for any new junior/intermediate devs on my team (or anyone unfamiliar with functional programming).
[0] https://www.manning.com/books/grokking-simplicity
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19305264-data-and-realit...
164 pages. This book has had a bigger impact on my professional work than any other.
tl; dr: Any description of reality is subjective, which means that no data model can be an objectively correct description of reality. The book presents methods for reasoning about data in spite of this.