5 Must read books for software engineers

I know we all live in a digital era where we prefer video courses more than books. But books have different values and being software engineers we spend our whole day watching the screen, I think we should shift some learning from books. Here are 5 hand-picked books for every Software Engineer! Upgrade your career by learning from these books!

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems

This book covers every angle of scalable system design.

In this practical and comprehensive guide, author Martin Kleppmann helps you navigate this diverse landscape by examining the pros and cons of various technologies for processing and storing data. The software keeps changing, but the fundamental principles remain the same. With this book, software engineers and architects will learn how to apply those ideas in practice, and how to make full use of data in modern applications.

• Peer under the hood of the systems you already use, and learn how to use and operate them more effectively
• Make informed decisions by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of different tools
• Navigate the trade-offs around consistency, scalability, fault tolerance, and complexity
• Understand the distributed systems research upon which modern databases are built
• Peek behind the scenes of major online services, and learn from their architectures

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

The book helps you identify how bad code looks like and suggests how it should have been written in the first place. A lot of code snippets have been shown to consolidate our understanding of a particular topic in consideration. Of course, it will be difficult to remember all the concepts by just one time reading. As such, this book will have to be read and referred to multiple times by the reader to have the concepts etched in the mind. So it’s a really good book for you if you write a lot of code or review it.

• How to tell the difference between good and bad code
• How to write good code and how to transform bad code into good code
• How to create good names, good functions, good objects, and good classes
• How to format code for maximum readability
• How to implement complete error handling without obscuring code logic
• How to unit test and practice is test-driven development
  
  This book is a must for any developer, software engineer, project manager, team lead, or systems analyst with an interest in producing better code.

Clean Architecture: A Craftsman’s Guide to Software Structure and Design

Martin’s Clean Architecture doesn’t merely present options. Drawing on over a half-century of experience in software environments of every imaginable type, Martin tells you what choices to make and why they are critical to your success. As you’ve come to expect from Uncle Bob, this book is packed with direct, no-nonsense solutions for the real challenges you’ll face–the ones that will make or break your projects.

• Learn what software architects need to achieve–and core disciplines and practices for achieving it
• Master essential software design principles for addressing function, component separation, and data management
• See how programming paradigms impose discipline by restricting what developers can do
• Understand what’s critically important and what’s merely a “detail”
• Implement optimal, high-level structures for web, database, thick-client, console, and embedded applications
• Define appropriate boundaries and layers, and organize components and services
• See why designs and architectures go wrong, and how to prevent (or fix) these failures

Clean Architecture is essential reading for every current or aspiring software architect, systems analyst, system designer, and software manager–and for every programmer who must execute someone else’s designs.

Software Engineering at Google

Today, software engineers need to know not only how to program effectively but also how to develop proper engineering practices to make their codebase sustainable and healthy.

• This book emphasizes this difference between programming and software engineering. How can software engineers manage a living codebase that evolves and responds to changing requirements and demands over the length of its life?
• Based on their experience at Google, software engineers Titus Winters and Hyrum Wright, along with technical writer Tom Manshreck, present a candid and insightful look at how some of the world’s leading practitioners construct and maintain software.
• This book covers Google’s unique engineering culture, processes, and tools and how these aspects contribute to the effectiveness of an engineering organization.
• You’ll explore three fundamental principles that software organizations should keep in mind when designing, architecting, writing, and maintaining code: How time affects the sustainability of software and how to make your code resilient over time How scale affects the viability of software practices within an engineering organization What trade-offs a typical engineer needs to make when evaluating design and development decisions

Head First Object-Oriented Analysis & Design

Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design show you how to analyze, design, and write serious object-oriented software: software that’s easy to reuse, maintain and extend; software that doesn’t hurt your head; software that lets you add new features without breaking the old ones. Inside you will learn how to:

• Use OO principles like encapsulation and delegation to build applications that are flexible
• Apply the Open-Closed Principle (OCP) and the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) to promote reuse of your code
• Leverage the power of design patterns to solve your problems more efficiently
• Use UML, use casesand diagrams to ensure that all stakeholders are communicating clearly to help you deliver the right software that meets everyone’s needs.

By exploiting how your brain works, Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design compresses the time it takes to learn and retain complex information. Expect to have fun, expect to learn, expect to be writing great software consistently by the time you’re finished reading this!

Hope you will have great learning by reading these books. Let us know your experience.