Jeff Atwood's Book Recommendations

"Highly recommend."

"@jonobacon highly recommend this book as well"

"Q: Why do you recommend Code Complete so much? A: In programming, people can be very dogmatic about what they think is right. Code Complete is not preachy in that way and instead cites a lot of data."

"The very act of reading this book already sets you apart from probably ninety percent of your fellow developers. In a good way."

"The book Peopleware was actually instrumental in our getting this understanding that 80% of anything you attack is about questions like: How do people interact with the software? How can you get them to interact in a way that makes sense? That’s what you need to worry about. A lot of the time it doesn’t matter if your code is technically correct or pretty. That’s irrelevant if no one can actually understand what the hell it does. So, let’s get to first principles, first causes. Let’s understand what’s going on here."

"If you've ever seen the performance of an all-star sports team suffer due to poor coaching, you'll appreciate this book."

"This book is *profoundly* weird... next level galaxy brain weird. I mean that as a compliment!"

"This book is *profoundly* weird... next level galaxy brain weird. I mean that as a compliment! 🥴"

"Q: One of the books you mention on your blog is Alan Cooper’s The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. When I read the book, I must admit to being a little bit offended by his description of software engineers as loving complexity. A: But they totally do! The book is completely correct! That’s one of my lessons to my fellow programmers: Stop trying to be a great programmer, and focus on trying to be a great human being. How do you build things that human beings can actually use. I’m not saying you have to fall in love with your fellow human beings—they’re a lot harder to love and are a lot more erratic than you’d like. But you have to appreciate that, if you want people to use your stuff, you have to understand human factors. You have to appreciate that you need to ask: What’s the prior art on this? How are other people doing this, from a design perspective? That's absolutely critical to being a great programmer."

"This is the book that introduced the world to the concept of personas."

"The collective wisdom of many journeyman coders distilled into succinct, digestible columns."

"A fantastically useful book; I've used whole chapters as guides for projects I worked on."

"Essential."

"The single best book on usability I've ever read."

"The epiphany offered in this book is that making mistakes is good– so long as they are all new, all singing, all dancing mistakes."

"Arguably the only classic book in our field. If you haven't read it, shame on you."

"I may be a card carrying member of the 'Keep It Simple Stupid' club, but I'm making a meteor sized exception for regular expressions."

"And the final version! Thank you @EdwardTufte .. be sure to pick up a copy, these books profoundly influenced my work."

"Please read Masters of Doom. It's such a great book."

"@Seanbabydotcom YES I OWN THIS BOOK AND IT IS MAGNIFICENT"

"Reading The Great Brain series with my 9 year old son and belatedly realizing I learned everything I know about business from these books, 35 years ago"

"The amazing thing about this book is that the cat does not break character the whole time, it's breathtaking"

""He lost the testicle but he did make All State." super late to this party, but the book Friday Night Lights is brutally honest documentary"

"Jeff Atwood recommended this book on his blog."

"Jeff Atwood recommended this book on his blog."

"Will give you a new appreciation of the 'devil in the details.'"

"Instead of worrying about code, the authors boiled down all the practical approaches that they've found to work in the real world into this one book."

"A full-on web usability primer."

"Essential."