
The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow - vladwetzel
http://www.dev-books.com
======
JelteF
Although not directly development related. The most impressive book I've had
the pleasure of reading is "Gödel Escher Bach: An eternal golden braid" (also
known as GEB) from Douglas Hofstadter.

It's hard to explain what it is about exactly, but it contains ideas and
concepts from mathematics, computer science, philosophy and conscience. All of
it is explained in very clear and interesting way. I can recommend it to
anyone interested in these topics.

The book won a Pulitzer and to take a quote from the Scientific American about
it: "Every few decades, an unknown author brings out a book of such depth,
clarity, range, wit, beauty and originality that it is recognized at once as a
major literary event."

~~~
curuinor
I heard a story from an AI professor a few years ago, who had an interesting
heuristic for picking grad student applications to trash: if it mentions GEB,
off it goes into the circular file.

Fun book. Hofstadter actually doesn't like computers, apparently: this is in
the record, and I've heard him mention that fact multiple times. He just likes
playing with ideas.

~~~
Kiro
> if it mentions GEB, off it goes into the circular file

Why?

~~~
jessermeyer
Because it's a Strange Loop.

~~~
theoh
Hmm, yes, I can see a product idea here: Klein bottle waste baskets.

When your waste basket is nonorientable, life becomes much simpler. Everything
is both inside and outside the trash.

~~~
vram22
He he, good one. That reminds me of a joke I once made, in some relevant
context, referencing Heisenberg and Pauli, but I'm _uncertain_ what it was
now, so I'll _exclude_ it from here.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Pauli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Pauli)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg)

------
0x54MUR41
This is like Hacker News Book [1].

But, it scraps user comments that contain Amazon book link from HN and orders
them by theirs point. If you wonder how much money Hacker News Book has been
made, I would suggest to read this post [2]. The different part with this is
that Hacker News Book shows not only the most mentioned books all the time but
also per week. Hacker News Book has more diversity of book topics since HN is
not limited for programming discussions.

Anyway, I just want to say congratz to the OP for launching this. I think you
miss "Show HN" on your post title.

[1]: [http://hackernewsbooks.com/](http://hackernewsbooks.com/)

[2]: [http://hackernewsbooks.com/blog/making-1000-dollars-
in-5-day...](http://hackernewsbooks.com/blog/making-1000-dollars-in-5-days-
with-amazon-associates)

~~~
vladwetzel
Good one, will be interesting to compare amazon statistics for 5 days. I
didn't think to invest in this project much time like this guys did and didn't
expect so much feedback :)

------
coderholic
I started playing with Google's BigQuery today, and it has StackOverflow and
HN and GitHub datasets that make pulling data like this relatively trivial.
I've been super impressed with it. Examples here:
[https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/12/google-
bigque...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/12/google-bigquery-
public-datasets-now-include-stack-overflow-q-a) and some more at
[https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-
data/stackoverflow](https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-
data/stackoverflow)

I just quickly hacked together this query which pulls out all amazon URLs in
post answers:

    
    
        SELECT REGEXP_EXTRACT(body, r'[^a-z](http[a-z\:\-\_0-9\/\.]+amazon[a-z\:\-\_0-9\/\.]*)[^a-z]') AS link, COUNT(1)
        FROM [bigquery-public-data:stackoverflow.posts_answers] 
        GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 2 DESC LIMIT 20
    

It takes 5 seconds to run - over ALL stackoverflow answers!

------
blurrywh
Nice Amazon affiliate hack.

Would be great if the OP would tell us how many sales he made through this
post (once he got the stats from the Amazon affiliate dashboard).

~~~
eliben
I'm not sure I see what's wrong with this. The author obviously invested work
in this and provided a resource others may find useful. You're free _not_ to
buy books through their affiliate links.

~~~
ysavir
What about this is useful? There is no breakdown of whether the mentions were
upvoted or downvoted, no mention of whether they solved the problem (or were
even relevant to the question), no review of the books so that readers can
make an informed decision, etc. This list is not much different than making a
list of the top selling programming books on amazon.

~~~
eliben
I like lists like this for discovering books I haven't heard of. I don't make
an immediate buy decision based on appearance in a list, and will do more
research. But it's a nice way to run into something you didn't run into before
for some reason.

To each their own; shaming the OP on HN for adding affiliate links on their
own website, on the product of their own effort, is what I'm trying to point
out.

------
henrik_w
A relatively new book that isn't mentioned (but that I really like) is "The
Effective Engineer" by Edmond Lau.

[https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Engineer-Engineering-
Dispro...](https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Engineer-Engineering-
Disproportionate-Meaningful/dp/0996128107/)

Edit: Here's why I like it: [https://henrikwarne.com/2017/01/15/book-review-
the-effective...](https://henrikwarne.com/2017/01/15/book-review-the-
effective-engineer/)

~~~
tekoyaki
Currently reading this since I saw your blog post. Thanks!

------
vram22
The Art of Software Testing by Glenford Myers is great.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenford_Myers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenford_Myers)
[1]

The anecdote in the beginning of the book, where he poses a simple question -
how many test cases can you write for this simple program? about the geometry
of a triangle - is mind-blowing, and sticks in my mind many years after
reading it.

He says most people he gave it to, even experienced devs, did somewhat poorly
or just average on it. I gave it as a test to a team (of juniors) on a project
I was leading, once, and it made them see some light. We subsequently went on
to deliver a pretty well-tested project.

[1] Excerpts:

[ Glenford Myers (born December 12, 1946) is an American computer scientist,
entrepreneur, and author. He founded two successful high-tech companies
(RadiSys and IP Fabrics), authored eight textbooks in the computer sciences,
and made important contributions in microprocessor architecture. He holds a
number of patents, including the original patent on "register scoreboarding"
in microprocessor chips.[1] He has a BS in electrical engineering from
Clarkson University, an MS in computer science from Syracuse University, and a
PhD in computer science from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.
]

[ During this period, Myers also authored his first four books, including The
Art of Software Testing, a book that became a classic and a best-seller in the
computer science field, staying in print for 26 years before it was replaced
by a second edition in 2004.[3] Myers also served as a lecturer in computer
science at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, where he taught
graduate-level courses in computer science. Years later, he was the 1988
recipient of the J.-D. Warnier Prize for his contributions to the field of
software engineering. ]

------
driscoll42
Is there any way to do this datamining, but not _just_ looking at amazon
links? By that I mean that I'm sure people mention "Code Complete" often
enough, but don't bother linking to it on Amazon. That'd be interesting to see
the results.

Also could be interesting to see this study, but also weighted based on the
number of votes the posts referring to them got.

~~~
vladwetzel
I still have data dump, will take a look on book-name-mentions without links,
if it makes any difference in top.

------
Unbeliever69
Didn't see SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) on that
list. Surprised considering how often I hear it quoted on SO. You would think
it was the bible of computer science. A little old in the tooth i'd imagine.

~~~
lunchladydoris
It's there, just outside the top 30. Select the Computer Science category and
you'll see it near the bottom.

~~~
Unbeliever69
I obviously didn't look very closely. Thanks for the clarification.

------
moron4hire
I wonder how many people actually read the books they were suggesting.

Like here on HN, Art of Computer Programming gets mentioned a lot. But I've
not met anyone who has actually read it. And I own a copy. It's so hard of a
read that I am just going to assume anyone who says they did is either lying
or Donald Knuth.

I'm suspect of books as a means of information conveyance. They make great
mediums for narratives, but narrative is too slow for technical writing.
Similarly, I dislike videos, podcasts, and conference talks. Technical writing
should be a wiki-like document where terms expand in-place. Start super high-
level. Always written in clipped, imperative style. Single line per fact. Like
mathematical proofs, but maybe in reverse.

~~~
hackermailman
I've finished and very much enjoyed the first volume, which is equivalent to
the curriculum in any first year compsci course from what I've seen of
university lecture schedules (Data Structures such as
Lists/Stacks/Queues/Trees/Arrays,GC,'helper functions' and program
design,O-notation analysis,testing and debugging w/trace routines, I/O
algorithms) but of course in much more detail with much harder problems.

To understand the first few hundred pages on mathematical preliminaries, the
books "The Art and Craft of Problem Solving" by Zeitz and "Concepts of Modern
Mathematics" by Stewart, were essential, both of which were recommended here
in other book list posts. I also had already read the CS:APP book which covers
x86-64 assembly so the MIX introduction was fairly straight forward.
[http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/](http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/)

A book for me that was hard to read, is this book:
[http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/pfpl.html](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/pfpl.html)
Practical Foundations for Programming Languages each page I have to translate
with the notation guide, and is a research exercise searching Wikipedia for
additional material.

------
hodgesrm
I'm really happy to see "Java Concurrency in Practice" at #4 on the list.

It's a great intro to concurrent programming with lessons that apply to
virtually any high-level programming language. The chapter on the Java memory
model is the best practical description of how languages map to multi-
processor memory models I have ever read. (Chapter 16 in my edition.)

After reading this book it's easy to understand why concurrency features in
other languages are necessary and what they are doing behind the scenes.
Golang channels come lightly to mind.

~~~
Tharkun
It's one of my all time favourite technical books, and easily my favourite
Java book.

If you're dealing with any kind of concurrency -- especially in Java -- then
it's pretty much a must-read.

Its explanation of the Java Memory Model is what got me interested in looking
at JVM implementations and related shenanigans.

------
peeters
Seems like a flaw in the algorithm if Effective Java is not in there. I
filtered by the Java tag and "Effective C++" showed up, but not Effective
Java.

------
artursapek
People who make these Amazon referral farm sites, is anyone willing to share
how much money they make off theirs? Maybe like a $ per 100 pageviews stat or
something? I'm curious.

~~~
vladwetzel
I will publish results on site after a while. Yesterday I've made same post on
reddit, 5 books were ordered.

------
tankenmate
One book(s) that I didn't see come up on the list was "The Art of Computer
Programming". It would be interesting to see if that was because it's
popularity got spread out because of multiple volumes or if people just don't
mention it that much.

~~~
VLM
SO skews extremely IT as opposed to CS.

There is CS on SO, but SO is really designed to, and flooded with, stuff like
"how to verify replication on mysql 5.6?" or "How do I install PIP for python
on freebsd" and not so much "Lets have us a nice debate about P=NP" or "can
someone clearly explain the entire proof of why 3SAT is NP-Complete at like a
TED talk level?"

------
ComputerGuru
Can someone recommend a good book on linear algebra for somebody that took it
in college but needs a refresher plus some advanced linear algebra concepts
for machine learning?

~~~
randcraw
The texts that I hate least (LA and I have a long and rocky relationship):

\- Coding the Matrix, Klein [https://www.amazon.com/Coding-Matrix-Algebra-
Applications-Co...](https://www.amazon.com/Coding-Matrix-Algebra-Applications-
Computer/dp/0615880991) This has a strong emphasis on LA's utility in CS, and
includes concepts outside traditional LA that enrich the narrative.

\- Intro to Linear Algebra, Strang [https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-
Linear-Algebra-Gilbert-S...](https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Linear-
Algebra-Gilbert-Strang/dp/0961408898/ref=la_B001H6L6OK_1_9) Strang approaches
LA from a practical less-theoretical angle, which makes it very sensible if
you're an engineer but may not be as suitable if you're a mathematician.

\- Linear Algebra, A Modern Intro, Poole [https://www.amazon.com/Linear-
Algebra-Introduction-Available...](https://www.amazon.com/Linear-Algebra-
Introduction-Available-CengageNOW/dp/0534998453/ref=sr_1_4) This is a solid
text that has worked out most of its bugs over the editions.

\- Linear Algebra and its Applications, Lay [https://www.amazon.com/Linear-
Algebra-Applications-Updated-C...](https://www.amazon.com/Linear-Algebra-
Applications-Updated-CD-ROM/dp/0321287134/ref=pd_sim_14_16) Like Poole, this
is also a solid and long running text.

The books by Klein and Strang also benefit from free videos of those courses
that are available from Coursera/BrownU and MIT OCW. Klein's is also available
on the Kindle.

~~~
ComputerGuru
Thanks for taking the time to write that out. I'll check them out.

------
CalChris
The 2nd edition of the Dragon book is a worthy update to an old classic. It's
the only book on the list I like.

I've been sitting in on Monica Lam's Stanford CS 243 lectures and she's
covering scheduling and software pipelining right now. Lam definitely knows
her material; she wrote the papers before she re-wrote the book. She's an
excellent lecturer to all of 15 students and one who asks perhaps more than
his fair share of questions.

------
dj-wonk
The results from the "Compiler-Construction" are not good. You'll find better
results from a search engine, Q&A site, or bookseller:

Here are the top 10:

    
    
        #1 Design Patterns - Ralph Johnson, Erich Gamma, John Vlissides, Richard Helm
        #2 Clean Code - Robert C. Martin
        #3 The C Programming Language - Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. Ritchie
        #4 CLR Via C# - Jeffrey Richter 
        #5 Modern C++ Design - Andrei Alexandrescu
        #6 Large-scale C++ Software Design - John Lakos
        #7 Inside the Microsoft Build Engine - Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi, William Bartholomew
        #8 Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 core reference - Dino Esposito
        #9 Compilers - Alfred V. Aho
        #10 Accelerated C++ - Andrew Koenig, Barbara E. Moo
    

Ok, #9 is a sensible choice. The rest are not about compiler construction.

Now, the top 20:

    
    
        #11 Hacker's Delight - Henry S. Warren
        #12 Nos camarades Français - Elida Maria Szarota (actually The C++ Programming Language by Stroustrup)
        #13 Compilers - Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi
        #14 Inside the C++ Object Model
        #15 Code - Charles Petzold
        #16 Hacking, 2nd Edition - Jon Erickson
        #17 C Plus Plus Primer - Stanley B. Lippman, Josée Lajoie, Barbara E. Moo
        #18 C Interfaces and Implementations - David R. Hanson
        #19 Language Implementation Patterns - Terence Parr
        #20 LISP in Small Pieces - Christian Queinnec
    

Ok, #13 and #19 look relevant. The rest... not so much, at least by a quick
skim.

Here are the top 30:

    
    
        #21 Linkers and Loaders - John R. Levine
        #22 Assembly Language Step-by-Step - Jeff Duntemann
        #23 The Garbage Collection Handbook - Richard Jones, Antony Hosking, Eliot Moss
        #24 Game Scripting Mastery - Alex Varanese
        #25 Domain-specific Languages - Martin Fowler, Rebecca Parsons
        #26 Computer Architecture - John L. Hennessy, David A. Patterson
        #27 The Elements of Computing Systems - Noam Nisan, Shimon Schocken
        #28 The ACE Programmer's Guide - Stephen D. Huston, James C. E. Johnson, Umar Syyid
        #29 Modern Compiler Implementation in C - Andrew W. Appel, Maia Ginsburg
        #30 Algorithms + Data Structures - Niklaus Wirth
    

Caveat: I am not a compiler writer, though I have read many of these books.
Still, my point stands, a good search engine gives more convincing results.
Let me know if I'm missing something.

~~~
kod
#20 Lisp in Small Pieces

This is absolutely relevant to compiler construction.

~~~
dj-wonk
Thanks for pointing that out. Here's a snippet about it:

> This is a comprehensive account of the semantics and the implementation of
> the whole Lisp family of languages, namely Lisp, Scheme and related
> dialects. It describes 11 interpreters and 2 compilers, including very
> recent techniques of interpretation and compilation.

------
sharmi
For all those people who wonder why is the popular XYZ book not on the list:

The algorithm here is to take the links to amazon and make a count of it.
Plain and simple.

For a more popular book like SICP, it just going to mentioned by it's acronym
as SICP. The expanded version of the title "Structure and Interpretation of
Computer Programs" is rarely mentioned and so is the author name. An amazon
link would be almost non-existent. This is because, the book is so popular the
reader needs no introduction. Unfortunately, as per the logic used for this
site, it will not be accounted. The same goes for books whose multiple
versions show up in the result.

This is not to put down the dev-books.com site in anyway. To do a
disambiguating parser that can parse any format of title and/or author name
would increase the complexity and implementation time by orders of magnitude.
It would also be completely against the mantra of "Release early and often".

------
kristopolous
I wonder how many (0?) users cite the same book over and over again and if
that's accounted for.

Furthermore I wonder if peddling one's own book on SO leads to more sales.

~~~
vladwetzel
All links counted, so basically you can promote your book over SO, but the
numbers are way too large.

------
jackschultz
Really cool here. Speaking of book mentions, I actually did a project a couple
months ago that checks for all the Amazon products mentioned on Reddit:
[http://www.productmentions.com](http://www.productmentions.com)

I don't have it at the moment, but seems useful to do things like check for
topics or something so it'd have the ability to check for book topics and
things like that too.

------
forgetsusername
How valuable is this without any of the discussion context surrounding these
books? It seems unlikely that I'm going to purchase a book based on a metric
like "mentions", when much of the discussion could be negative. I mean, I get
it from the perspective of scraping/development practice, but it doesn't feel
overly useful. And I'm a book hunter.

------
deskcoder
This is pretty cool. Would also be neat if you could filter by date ... like
what were the top JS books mentioned so far in 2017.

~~~
vladwetzel
Good idea! Will try to make this filter as soon as possible. Thanks!

------
akulbe
It seems interesting to me, how often books about C++ are mentioned in there.
5 of 30 listed

I say that, because it seems like people like to talk bad about C++ as if it's
terrible language (rather than just another tool in the toolbox).

I don't have an opinion either way. Just making an observation.

------
jcahill84
This is great. Do you have the code you used to scrape and rank the books
posted somewhere?

~~~
vladwetzel
Stackexchange published their database dump, so there were not engineering at
all :)

------
amai
My own list is better ;-)

[https://github.com/asmaier/littlelists/blob/master/books_pro...](https://github.com/asmaier/littlelists/blob/master/books_programming.md)

------
agentgt
I have owned many of those books at various times in my life (either because
of school or I borrowed it errr accidentally stole it from work).

The only book I have kept and refuse to part with is the Kernighan + Ritchie
book (and I'm not a C programmer).

------
Malic
I'm surprised that Peopleware (DeMarco and Lister) isn't in there somewhere.

~~~
UweSchmidt
How, in the process of answering a specific programming question on
Stackoverflow, would a link to a book on project management be appropriate?

Also, what's up with the phrase "I'm surprised" that always comes up in
threads like this: If you believe a book should be higher up, tell us why! Or
do you question the author's methodology?

If you misjudge the current significance or influence of a thing, ... so what?

~~~
pc86
I'm not sure what you could have possibly hoped to gain by writing this
condescending "I'm so smart" response.

------
megawatthours
JS: The Good Parts is obsolete

~~~
alexchantavy
Any recommendations for something more up to date?

~~~
hackermailman
The 'You Don't Know JS series' [https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-
JS](https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS) or this
[http://eloquentjavascript.net/](http://eloquentjavascript.net/)

------
40acres
Not a lot of algorithms books on this list, I was surprised to see CLRS at
#14.

~~~
hashhar
SO doesn't focus on CS, they focus on solving problems like "How to get better
replication on postgres?" etc. This is also why books like SICP, TAOCP and
CLRS seem to be missing.

~~~
acchow
CLRS is there at 14... but listed with 1 author :(

------
mooneater
Results for R remind me that R is not a search friendly name

------
LoSboccacc
too much hard coding books imho. 'the design of everyday thing' and 'don't
make me think' should be read more.

~~~
gcp
_the design of everyday thing_

I've seen that recommended many times but it's a terrible book, IMHO. (I don't
remember the specifics why, but vaguely remember the author waffles around
without any real points).

~~~
kej
I think it suffers a little from the Seinfeld effect, where it was completely
original at the time but created enough of a following that it seems
derivative when you go back to it.

------
hexagonsun
One of my older, much more experienced co-workers says "The Art of Unit
Testing is last... how poetic". Perfect.

~~~
keithnz
the top one, which I happen to be a contributor to, is about how to get
existing software under test

------
maweki
Happy to see that Okasaki is on the list.

------
sAbakumoff
Nicely done, but what about python, ruby and php? Haven't you found any books
on these topics at all?

------
codazoda
This is a great reference and, I hope, a great way to make some money being an
affiliate. Good job.

------
RusAlex
When I select HTML tag there is "Design Patterns" gang of four on first place.

------
pc86
The C# button doesn't seen to actually filter the results, perhaps due to the
#?

------
kris-s
Just to throw my two cents in here: my favorite technical book is the fairly
recent Go Programming Language by Donovan & Kernighan (www.gopl.io).

It's very readable and has _excellent_ exercises to do as you work through the
book.

------
jordache
i see a regex book at #15. I really need that.

Is mastering regex simply a form of memorization? There doesn't seem to be any
logical pattern to the various flags.

------
xycodex
Why is no one talking about the #1 book on legacy code?

------
sigstoat
i'd really like to see this repeated for other top stackexchange sites. math,
mathoverflow, software engineering, electrical engineering, etc.

------
mongmong
Glad to see Domain Driven Design aka the Blue Book.

------
JacenRKohler
This is a great resource. Thanks for sharing!

------
RawData
No Ruby on Rails books? Or Python?

~~~
osullivj
But lots of C++ books. C++ and Python are my primary languages, and I own far
more C++ books than Python. For C++ I've got all Scott Meyers stuff,
Alexandrescu, Stroustrups C++ language. For Python I've got Beazley, and
that's it. My guess is that Python, and probably Ruby too, are so much easier
to learn than C++, so fewer books are read and sold.

~~~
blacksmythe
The Python on-line documentation is really outstanding. I don't use any Python
books at all.

~~~
RawData
yes again; good for you...but totally irrelevant.

There are python books, they are sold, keeping them off this list is lame.

------
ska
Is there any reason to expect this distribution to vary much from "top
selling" ?

~~~
ska
I was genuinely curious. Superficially, it seems like "mentions" would scale
with sales (as opposed to, say, recommendations if you could work that out).

------
TylerH
Should be a short list since Stack Overflow is not the place for book
recommendations.

~~~
jonknee
What does that have to do with anything? The point is to list the most popular
books that are talked about in the trenches. Stack Overflow seems like a
perfect data set for something like that. Similar to number of citations for
scholarly works or Google Trend data for pop culture.

------
erichmond
2,3,5,6,8,9,11,12,14,15

------
devsmt
beautiful!

------
grabcocque
Ah, the good old Design Patterns book, responsible for more atrocious over-
abstracted, unreadable, hard to maintain Java code than anything else before
or since.

~~~
jasode
_> , the good old Design Patterns book, responsible for more atrocious over-
abstracted, _

This is a misunderstanding of the DP book. It would be similar to saying that
the existence of TVTropes.com _is responsible_ for terrible scripts of tv
shows and movies. Or, the existence of the Oxford English Dictionary _is
responsible_ for bad novels and useless documentation.

The DP book is a _catalog_ (to gain awareness) and not a _checklist_ (that you
must do). It's a collection of _observations_ about software structures out in
the wild. It's not about prescription.

Even without the phrase "design patterns", it's easy to surmise that
programmers out there are _independently and unknowingly_ re-inventing the
same higher-level structures (similar to tv tropes) but without giving them
_formal names_. The DP book gives them _formal names_ and hence, an attempt at
_shared vocabulary_.

One can go to the amazon.com page for Design Patterns and click "Look inside"
for the "First Pages" and see that the authors wanted to present a _catalog_ :
[https://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Elements-Reusable-
Obj...](https://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Elements-Reusable-Object-
Oriented/dp/0201633612)

~~~
iak8god
> This is a misunderstanding of the DP book.

That may be, but it's a very common misunderstanding of the book _by junior
developers_ who read the book as a list of recipes to use anywhere they might
be applicable.

Is it the book's fault that it's understood this way? I don't know.
Regardless, the book + this persistent understanding and use of it are, as
grabcocque says, "responsible for more atrocious over-abstracted, unreadable,
hard to maintain Java code than anything else before or since."

~~~
goostavos
I dunno if it's just _junior_ ones. I've encountered my share of "enterprise
architects" that will use this book as though it were a bible when trying to
justify their near-insane scribbling of boxes and lines on the white board.

~~~
iak8god
Yes, well, some of the juniors never repent. Plus it's a decent tactic for job
security through obscurity...

------
SquareWheel
You're violating the terms of Amazon's associate program by including
affiliate links without notice.

>"You must clearly state the following on your Site or any other location
where Amazon may authorize your display or other use of Content: “We are a
participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate
advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking
to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.”"

[https://affiliate-
program.amazon.com/help/operating/agreemen...](https://affiliate-
program.amazon.com/help/operating/agreement)

~~~
vladwetzel
Oops. Thanks for comment, will fix it asap

~~~
bsilvereagle
On that note, there is a similar clause in the Google Analytics ToS.

------
grabcocque
I got a problem with this code. I know, I'll use design patterns.

Great! I now have an AbstractProblemFactory to generate problems on demand.

------
ak39
"Patterns" are to the art of good programming what organized religion is to
the art of good living. Everyone loves the ideas, everyone hates the
implementations.

