The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to MasterBook
by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
Who uses, recommends or left The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.
Programmer and essayist, formerly of Amazon, Google and Grab; author of the Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants and Stevey's Blog Rants essays.
loved
This is one of my favorite books on programming, although I burned through it in about 3 or 4 hours, and didn't learn a huge amount from it.
His 'Ten Great Books' post (Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants), introduced as 'ten books that I really enjoyed, and that I'd recommend to anyone who's a computer programmer', limited to books he has finished and rereads. The page carries no publication date; the only date on it is an inline note dated 12/13/2004, so the post is from 2004 or earlier.
Statistician and software developer; chief scientist at RStudio/Posit and creator of the tidyverse of R packages.
recommended
This is about the craft of software development, and thinking about how to produce good code. As the name suggests, it's a very pragmatic and hands-on book. It really helped me on my journey as a software engineer, to be able to write quality code day in and day out, and be confident that it's going to work correctly.
Five Books interview on computer science books for data scientists
Software developer and writer; co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse, author of the Coding Horror blog.
recommended
This book reminds me a lot of Programming Pearls, but it's actually better, because it's less focused on code. 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.
His long-running "Recommended Reading for Developers" list, last updated September 2025.
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The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.
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Hardware, services4 years
Software5 years
Podcasts, courses, other8 years
Books25 years
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