Books That Every Software Developer Must Read

As experienced Engineers, we frequently get asked what books we recommend for Software Engineers, of all levels and disciplines. We’ve compiled a list of them below, in our recommended order of reading. Each book builds upon the next, bringing compound value as you make your way through them. No matter how long you’ve been working in software development, there’s always something new to learn.

Code That Fits in Your Head

This is a thick tome of rules-of-thumb for writing software. The rules are presented almost in a building-block fashion, so that you could apply them piece-by-piece over time.

Mark Seemann's ultimate goal with this book is to help you manage complexity, by keeping a watchful eye on dependencies, responsibilities, separation of concerns, fostering stronger adherence to processes (via checklists), measuring complexity, and understanding how to compose and decompose 'units' of software.

Shape Up Book

This book is chock-full of great lessons, learned from real-world experience. The lessons came from building Basecamp as it scaled from 4 to over 50 people, over the course of over 12 years (2003-2015+). Ryan Singer used tight feedback loops to develop a fixed methodology to be able to consistently deliver to a high standard.

The Shape Up book educates the reader on it's unique strategy - divided into 3 parts to represent 37Signal's end-to-end process for feature delivery.