Now that the holiday season has come and gone, I know many of you have holiday cash that’s burning a hole in your pocket. Wait a minute. Before you go out and buy that new pair of Air Yeezy sneakers, how about making an investment in yourself first? If you plan on becoming a professional developer, you will have to do more than just study what is given to you in school. I will quickly run through my top five books that I believe belong on every beginning developer’s bookshelf and hopefully, you will run out to your nearest bookstore and grab a copy for yourself. Without further ado, here we go.

Code Complete 2, Steven C. McConnell

I like this book because it teaches you how to write code. The question is, can you write a “good” code?

This book goes through all the considerations you need to make while writing your code to greatly improve it in terms of maintainability. I also love the checklists that the author includes in the book.

Clean Code, Uncle Bob Martin

This book is of interest since it is about software craftsmanship. It will introduce you to a couple more advanced concepts that weren’t covered in Code Complete. It is a very easy read. You will find yourself referring to it over and over again.

The Pragmatic Programmer, Andrew Hunt and David Thomas

This book is great since it will give you a bunch of tips on how to master your craft. It will introduce you to some more advanced concepts such as aspect-oriented programming and domain languages. What I like most about this book is that it has a list of other books you should read to support those concepts. You will really be able to build a great library from the books you find inside.

The Art of Unit Testing, Roy Osherove

This is a good book about writing solid code via unit testing. Unit Testing is an approach that goes hand-in-hand with writing clean code. Most companies that use an agile approach will want you to understand how to write unit test and this book is helpful with that concept.

Domain Driven Design, Tackling Complexity at the Heart of Software ,  Eric Evans

Domain Driven Design (DDD) is everywhere in the industry. This book is a good read since it will teach you more about architecture and layering and how to understand the layered approaches that most architects are taking these days. This insight makes it easier for you to navigate through the code in complex systems that you will work on.

I hope you find these books useful. If you have any questions about some of the content you may find inside, feel free to email me at:

Tillman.Adrian@spcollege.edu  or contact me on Twitter: @proftill

Honorable Mention:

Refactoring, Improving Design Code, Martin Fowler

Design Patterns, The Elements of Reusable Object Oriented Software, Erich Gamma, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides, Richard Helm.

Images courtesy of Amazon.com.