The Best Books for Software Developers in 2022
A number of books have had a profound impact on my growth as a software engineer.
This is a list of those books.
Table of Contents
- The "Must Reads"
- Clean Code - Robert C. Martin
- The Pragmatic Programmer - David Thomas and Andrew Hunt
- Personal Growth
- 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen Covey
- How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie
- Company of One - Paul Jarvis
- Team Management & Leadership
- High Output Management - Andrew Grove
- The Making of a Manager - Julie Zhuo
- Startup Books
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz
- The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
Clean Code
The absolute best book for all developers who want to quickly get better at writing significantly better code.
If you want to learn how to write better code that the rest of your team can understand, this book is better than any other resource. Specifically, it dives into topics such as naming things, structuring and breaking down methods, code smells, and refactoring.
If you are or have goals of becoming a rockstar developer someday, this book will get you there.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Stephen Covey is a genius in human psychology. In this book, he dives deep into how you can be as effective as possible at anything you want.
It covers topics like how to work and interact with people so that everyone wins and gets what they want.
I learned how to think about situations and approach them in a way such that you know the direction and purpose of your effort from the moment you begin putting effort into something.
Even simple things like, how to be more proactive and get the things you want rather than waiting for them to eventually happen. If they ever do at all.
This is a fantastic book for anyone interested in improving their personal interactions, making better deals, and overall getting the outcomes in life that they want. Find a copy here.
How to Win Friends and Influence People
Dale Carnegie teaches us how to win friends and improve our overall interactions with other people.
The psychology behind how to be liked, how to build stronger relationships, and how to get the outcomes we want when working with people.
The title can be a little deceiving because our goal isn't to manipulate people. But you'll find in this book a better understanding of how your actions really do drive certain reactions and behaviors from people. And if you understand how and why this happens, you can better control the reactions and behaviors that you get from other people.
It's a psychological, mind-blowing read that just reminds you of basic things that we don't usually always think about but have a large impact on how people perceive and think about us.
If you're interested in improving how others perceive you and value being likable, highly looked up to, and respected - this is the book that will do it.
High Output Management
Andy Grove was the CEO and leader of Intel and is largely responsible for growing it into the massive company it is today.
In High Output Management, Grove dives deep into how management styles can have an impact on the output of a team. Specifically how, as a manager, you can scale your impact and ultimately have a much bigger impact on a team by enabling every member of the team to have a bigger impact.
It's a great read for anyone who is interested in management and improving their impact as a manager. If you want to become a manager at some point or improve your impact on the team, grab a copy.
The Lean Startup
This is a great book for anyone interested in building a software business.
The Lean Startup walks you through the process of creating a startup, but with an emphasis on the Lean process. That is a truly scientific and methodical approach to building features and products that help people and iterating on things by getting feedback and treating everything as an experiment.
You'll learn things like how to build an MVP that really accomplishes the goal of an MVP. How to not spend time building extra features or guessing what users need. Build the bare minimum product that delivers value and iterate from there.
Even if you aren't starting your own company, this is a book that will give you so much knowledge and a massive advantage at the startup you currently work at.
Recently, our team lost our product manager and I was able to step up and navigate our product development solely because of the incredible startup insights in this book.
Closing Thoughts
Please let me know if there's a book that you think should be on my list on Twitter.