What people recommend, in their own words, with the receipt.
Writer and consultant on formal methods and software correctness; author of Practical TLA+ and Logic for Programmers.
2 things
Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe ItBook Andy Oram, Greg Wilson (eds.)
But no blog post has influenced me as profoundly as Data and Reality or Making Software. There is no blog or talk about debugging as good as the Debugging book.
Hillel Wayne's Computer Things newsletter post on software books he wishes existed, naming the books that have most profoundly influenced him
buttondown.com ↗·2025-08-06
Data and RealityBook William Kent
It's heady and mindbending and delightful and completely changed how I think about software. I love it and recommend it to everybody I meet.
Hillel Wayne's Computer Things newsletter post about the 2nd edition of Data and Reality, his self-described favorite software book
buttondown.com ↗·2019-10-14
Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.
The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.
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The small bar beside a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.
The bar shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Full and green is recent. It drains, and turns amber and then grey, as the post gets older.
What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The bar is empty after about:
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