The world is full of great platforms of the modern world like videos, Blogs, Articles and Podcast etc. But there are many people who don’t want to miss the chance of reading a great book. And if you are reading this then definitely you love to read books. Even I used to read a lot of books covering tech-related stuff. In this post we gonna cover Top 7 best Software engineering books

Hey, guys today I want to talk about 7 best software engineering books out there in the market. The list is based on the most popular, most read and some are personal references and don’t base on any particular order. Its just review of the books mentioned below.

These books aren’t limited to just software engineers at least three of them are applicable to anybody if you’re a program manager, accountant, business analyst or in general just want to be more pragmatic or practical in life. I think these books are really interesting books to read. Hope you going to love them.

List of Top 10 Best Software engineering books

1. Clean Code
2. Working Effectively with Legacy Code
3. Introduction to Algorithms
4. Algorithms to Live By
5. Pragmatic Thinking & Learning
6. The Productive Programmer
7. Refactoring

1. Clean Code

The First book in our list of best software engineering books is called Clean Code. And this is probably the most hands-on in terms of hey here’s a sample situation, how should you approach this what’s the design in terms of agile software development talks about a lot of good practices and paradigms in software engineering.

It does overlap a little bit the refactoring book because there’s a section in this book that talks specifically about refactoring in general. I think this can be used as a handbook for the entire process of software development that will help you design a better product that is more maintainable and extensible in the long run.

This book also has great examples of good code versus bad code, what good formatting looks like what are code smells a little bit like I said about refactoring test-driven development. And honestly, everything you essentially need to get your product from inception to release so it’s a great tool to have in your arsenal. Clean Code is the best software engineering books if you want to crack a coding interview.

2. Working Effectively with Legacy Code

The second book in our list of best software engineering books is called Working Effectively With Legacy Code by Michael Feathers. In this book, the authors offer strategies to deal with large, complicated, untested legacy code bases. While you might think that we are in 2020 and now legacy code isn’t a problem anymore for most of us because we only have clean, effective, maintainable code and microservices all along.

Let me assure you that this is a misconception of ours. Legacy code still is one of the most challenging problems for many IT companies. And after reading this book, you should be able to understand the general mechanics of software working, like adding features, fixing bugs, optimizing and improving performance, and improving the design.

Furthermore, you learn how to get legacy code ready for compiling and how to identify where the code needs improvements. The book provides examples written in Java, C++, C, Python and C# but also comes with examples of how to deal with legacy code that is not object-oriented.

Working Effectively With Legacy Code is one of the best software engineering books in the market. You definitely have to go for it.

3. Introduction to Algorithms

The third book in our list of best software engineering books is called Introduction to Algorithms, Third Edition by Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, Thomas H. Cormen, and Clifford Stein. This book is nothing less than a basic guide to all kinds of algorithms. It is very comprehensive and accessible to all kinds of readers, beginners, and professionals alike.

It is clearly mentioned and covers a lot of subject matter. But it also is kind of difficult and not so easy to follow. It covers topics such as data structures, fast algorithms, coding, polynomial-time algorithms for seemingly intractable problems, graph theory, computational geometry, gets rid of errors and much more.

While it contains some examples in pseudo-code, it still is a very theoretical book in my eyes. If you want to go in-depth of software engineering then you have to go for it. This is the best book to understand coding in depth.

4. Algorithms to Live By

The fourth book in our list of best software engineering books is called Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. This is actually one of my favourite books because it has around 10 or 12 computer science concepts but you don’t need any knowledge of computer science or algorithms to understand that and it’s really interesting to kind of take a look into how things are optimized in the world of computer science.

But they actually have a direct parallel to how we operate in day-to-day life, for example, one of the things that are pretty common in computer science is called sorting we have various kinds of lists and items and you know orderings that we have to deal with we sort them in different ways we reverse them it’s like a concept that you study early on in computer science.

In this book, they give you an example of how you can use sorting to sort your clothes in certain orders so you can grab your clothes really effectively or the ones that you use more often are more accessible to you so that kind of stuff.

I think anybody will enjoy this book especially if you’re into optimizing your methods and your processes in life so yeah check it out if you find it interesting it’s a pretty good read and best software engineering books.

5. Pragmatic Thinking & Learning

The fifth book in our list of best software engineering books is called Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt. This is a pretty interesting book because the way the author goes our book is generally through the concept of software development but the actual core concept of this book is that software development the entire process actually happens in your head.

So it’s really critical for us to know how our brain operates and how we learn things, how we focus, how we defocus. So he uses a lot of study and concepts from neuroscience and cognitive science and kind of combines that with the process of software development. But, in the end, it’s presented in a way that anybody would find this pretty useful and informative.

There are slightly more technical concepts on this but you could easily skim that. And just focus on some of the case studies that the author has here about basically how the brain functions and you could probably come up with pretty interesting brain hacks and optimizations just by reading this book.

And if you’re a software developer it’s even more interesting to learn how the brain operates hand in hand with the process of software development or hardware development so yeah give it a try I think it’s pretty cool and one of the best software engineering books in the market.

6. The Productive Programmer

The sixth book in our list of best software engineering books is called The Productive Programmer by O REILLY. This is all about being more effective and efficient as a programmer it doesn’t really teach you how to become a better problem solver. But it definitely gives you a lot of information about things you can do to actually become productive at your craft.

And this is probably at the middle ground of where non-technical folks could probably gain some use out of it. But programmers or technical folks will definitely get a lot of use out of it. The book is divided into two main parts one the author calls mechanics and then the second part is called practice.

So the mechanics side of things he sets up a lot of ideas and tools that you can use to build your environment to become a productive programmer and this isn’t really just specific to programmers. It could be effective for anybody honestly but I should mention that everything he talks about is sort of around programming so I think developers and engineers will definitely enjoy this more.

And then the second part is actually even more interesting for software engineers where he talks about some neat principles like YAGNI which means You aren’t gonna need it. So like don’t do more than what you need and then there are some principles of dry which means don’t repeat yourself.

The way it talks about these principles are sort of removed from the actual coding it does have some samples of code to drive home the point. But I think it’s an easy read it’s not too technical it’s very easy going to read and the best software engineering books.

7. Refactoring

The last book in our list of best software engineering books is called Refactoring by Martin Fowler. The first edition of this book was actually one of my favourite books that I frequently refer to this one is a lot more technical. So now we are talking about books that are purely for programmers and software engineers.

So a lot of times in software engineering we work on a proof of concept or what we call the minimum viable product so the goal when you’re building a minimum viable product is to validate the concept of an idea. So you aren’t really concerned about the best engineering practices or you know like writing the most optimized or precise code.

You want to make a quick concept of the bare minimum that you can do so you can validate the idea and if if the idea is good then you build the whole system properly. If not then you scratch it or you iterate over it until you have a product that you can build on.

But now you want to go ahead and now you’ve got like bad code not because you’re a bad programmer or software engineer because you’ve rushed through putting things together and if you don’t fix those and build on them. Now you’ve got a base that’s not designed well and it adds what we call a lot of technical depth that hey i’m gonna build on top of it.

Make it good the pointers the book has you know how to detect code smells, how to refactor properly and effectively how to make it extensible modular. But do all that quickly right so this is super useful and probably the book that I use most because refactoring is a huge part of being a software developer. Refactoring is one of the best software engineering books in the market. You have to go for it, its worth of your time.

So yeah these are the seven best software engineering books in the market. Hope you like them and you can get anyone you feel intersting from the link provided above. Some of them are very technical directly aimed at software engineers and developers while the others are very easy reads that anybody could benefit from you just need a little bit of an interest in technology.

I think you’ll enjoy them and if you’re interested in other kinds of reviews then check out our website.