What are some things you have read that inspired and guided you as a programmer? [closed]

Question

For example, being a beginner, I find a lot of inspiration and direction from reading this post by Bryan Woods.

Answer 1

Ted Felix's Qbasic Tutorial encouraged me to learn to program with basic. From there I was so motivated that I went on to try to learn other languages. It is a very inspiring tutorial for beginning programming.

Answer 2

The book programmers at work : http://www.amazon.com/Programmers-Work-Interviews-Computer-Industry/dp/1556152116

A great book which feature interviews of world class programmers of the 80's

Answer 3

Uncle Bob Martin's programming posts. It is no longer active as Robert Martin is now posting videos on his new blog.

Answer 4

I found You and Your Research to be very valuable advice. This was a lecture by Hamming to his colleagues at Bell Labs.

What Bode was saying was this: "Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest." Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done.

Answer 5

"Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", Abelson & Sussman.

"Structured Programming", Dahl, Dijkstra & Hoare.

"GOTO Statement Considered Harmful", Dijkstra.

Answer 6

The Practice of Programming by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike

I found it unusual in that it promotes thinking, instead a lot of the typical lingo driven self promotionial books.

Answer 7

Coder to Developer - Mike gunderloy (Amazing Read)

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know - Kevlin Henney.

Masterminds of Programming - Federico Biancuzzi.

Just For Fun: Linus Torvalds

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.

Videos from yahoo : Douglas Crockford and Grady Booch.

Answer 8

I highly recommend reading Charles Petzold's Code The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software and of course the Mythical Man Month by Frederick P. Brooks. The first is an excellent insight into computers in general and how hardware and software play together. The latter is more about producing software in the real world. Both are extremely useful books.

Answer 9

As a teenager, I read translations of articles from Dave Small (*) in an Atari ST-related magazine and his writings were very inspiring to me. This guy was having fun solving tricky problems, not working for a big company but for his own and had great advice about people. People matter, not technology!

(*) Or David Small, from Gadgets by Small who emulated a Mac on an Atari.