
Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books, Ever - Anon84
http://knol.google.com/k/jurgen-appelo/top-100-best-software-engineering-books/z7e4mx2g6lir/3#
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russell
Not my list. This list is derived from the SWEBOK project, an IEEE Computer
Society list. It is a very process oriented list. Seven books on UML. I don't
know anyone who uses UML. I've never worked at a company that actually used
it. At least as many books on Agile Programming; how many do you need? A book
on CORBA. Really! Knuth is there; I guess he is mandatory. No other good books
on algorithms, but lots on patterns.

The author said that he explicitly left out books on technology. Sure there is
a lot of technology cruft out there, but surely there a few language specific
books that a good software engineer should read. Or maybe I'm just a hacker.

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tjpick
why the UML hate? Sequence and class diagrams and such can come in pretty
handy as a design or reverse engineering aid.

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mechanical_fish
I've been tempted to read _one_ book on UML. But seven? Surely at least four
or five of them are redundant?

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pg
Imagine what you'd get if you used the same technique to find the "best novels
ever."

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unalone
Modern Library held a "top books of the century" thing, using both critics and
popular vote to make two lists.

<http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html>

The critics one is decent, if a bit off (Ulysses 1: yes, Great Gatsby 2:
hardly), but the Ayn-Rand-meets-L-Ron-Hubbard on the other side always makes
me laugh, even though I'm a fan of Rand.

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pg
Their popular list suggests they didn't have any technology for discounting
the effects of voting blocs. I wonder if to this day they believe they had a
representative sample of popular opinion.

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unalone
If they did, they'd have to be pretty seriously deluded. Atlas Shrugged I can
see as #1 popular - there was the poll that said it was second only to the
Bible for average Americans - but Hubbard's stuff is incredibly derided. I
don't know anybody who's read a single book of his.

I'm sure they released a result more to gain popularity through controversy
than they did to get a truly accurate reading. And it worked, since theirs is
always the one I've heard named when people discuss "great books," and it
always gets people angry.

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MaysonL
Seems to be rather American-centric, and extremely topheavy with recent fads,
which isn't surprising, given the ridiculous method used to compile it. No
Dijkstra, no Wirth, no Hoare, no Brinch Hansen. No compilers, no Lisp
(although SICP might qualify). Totally absurd.

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azanar
There are books on here that I think are worthwhile, that could be called
classics, given the attention they've received. But not the whole list.

Generally, they are the ones that are specifically tied to the act of software
development, of making things and getting good at doing that well, rather than
the process and other roles surrounding it.

But then it seems that, given the definition from SWEBOK and others like
<http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?SoftwareEngineer>, software engineering is more
about the process than the product. So this list may be correct, and the
reason I don't hear about some of these titles so much is because I'm not as
much a part of the process crowd.

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subbu
For people who are looking for a shorter list: 1\.
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/navLinks/fog0000000262.html> 2\.
[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SixEssentialLanguageAgnosticPr...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SixEssentialLanguageAgnosticProgrammingBooks.aspx)
3\. <http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000020.html>

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ramchip
Not inherently bad, but... I can think of a least a 100 things I'd rather do
than read 100 books on the same topic.

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jonsen
Very interesting for sure. Just wonder how much the 'school factor' influences
rating. How many reviews and Googlings are due to students forced to read an
'arbitrary' title? Which titles are in fact professors favorites? I think
Applying UML and Patterns could be one.

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mynameishere
Holy god, "Head First Design Patterns" is #2? That's written at a 9th grade
level. The illustrations are written at a 4th grade level.

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bcater
Knuth all the way down at 16? Tisk.

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ramchip
You don't _read_ Knuth. You put him on your nicest bookshelf and check out a
page or two for emotional support when working on Java Enterprise Application
#431404.

