Articles Every Programmer Should Read

I feel like I have read most of these in a piecemeal fashion, but seeing all these articles together like this really drives home the importance of paying attention to the basics. Great collection; thanks for sharing!

infogulch• 12 years ago

So many lists. And so many good additions by people in the comments.

There should be a github repo and site that lists everything so additions can be managed.

andyroid• 12 years ago

All of these are great resources. Just as "Falsehoods programmers believe about names" they are howevere not resources every programmer needs to read (though they may of course benefit from it).

And honestly, a lot of "falsehoods" are really just nitpicking. I mean yes, you may once in your lifetime encounter a user with a real name longer than 2048 characters (or wherever you've set your limit) but really, if those are your biggest problems you're in a really good position :)

davidgerard• 12 years ago

Yep, that was the one I thought was conspicuously missing.

bitlord_219• 12 years ago

"What every programmer should know about SEO"

Yeah, no.

asolove• 12 years ago

Why not? While there are lots of terrible SEO consultants and stupid recommendations, knowing how SEO actually works and the way it rewards good, up-to-date content, is incredibly valuable. And knowing how things really work is the best way to defeat the crummy suggestions and gimmicks that a misinformed marketer might suggest.

ffreire• 12 years ago

I'm just assuming here, but I think the parent commenter was referring to the fact that not every programmer needs to know SEO, since there are several disciplines that don't depend on search engine results.

CanSpice• 12 years ago

When the article title includes the words "every programmer", that's a really large set of programmers. I don't think a programmer working on embedded systems needs to know about SEO, nor do kernel hackers, nor do scientific programmers...

Alupis2• 12 years ago

SEO tactics and practices change so rapidly... almost any article or book written about SEO is outdated by the time it's released (unfortunately). Tactics that were considered "best practices" even 6 months ago may actually harm your site these days. -- There is no magic bullet for SEO.

kjs3• 12 years ago

I realize this is going to come as something of a shock to you, but most of the programmers in the world aren't cool kids working at the Next Big web startup. SEO isn't part of their world, never will be, and SEO consultants never come knocking at their door.

derwiki• 12 years ago

At least, if you're a programmer and need to learn a little about SEO, this is a decent article. Most information on this topic are in slideshow format, with only broad bullet points. This one is pretty text heavy and information dense, which I appreciate.

at-fates-hands• 12 years ago

Maybe front-end developers; but agreed, not every programmer should know SEO.

patrickmay• 12 years ago

The list is heavily weighted to implementation details. I'd include a few essays like "The Rise of Worse is Better" (http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html) to encourage programmers to take a step back and think about design and architecture more often.

mwnz2• 12 years ago

+1 to this.

arethuza• 12 years ago

Maybe also the wonderful "Big Ball of Mud" essay:

http://www.laputan.org/mud/mud.html

dsugarman• 12 years ago

I have to mess with the html to read the article because of the background..

OWaz• 12 years ago

On Chrome I use the Stylebot plugin because there are many sites that make it difficult to read their content.

Alupis2• 12 years ago

I would argue that every programmer should be at least exposed to some assembly, so you can understand (and appreciate) a little more about how the computer actually does what it does.

A great (free!) ebook pdf is "Programming From The Ground Up" on the GNU site: http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/pgubook/

platz2• 12 years ago

HOWTO: Be more productive http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity

On Being A Senior Engineer http://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engi...

MasterScrat• 12 years ago

Life is short (or so I’m told) so why waste it doing something dumb?

Ooh Aaron... :-(

zem• 12 years ago

if we're adding "philosophy of programming" essays, i'm a huge fan of james hague's "Slumming with BASIC Programmers" [http://prog21.dadgum.com/21.html]. it's a small post, but i personally found and continue to find it very thought-provoking.

mwnz2• 12 years ago

10 Articles every web programmer should read. Personally, SEO has zero bearing on my work. Java is only relevant to a subset of developers.

nicholassmith2• 12 years ago

I'd argue that the ones on memory, floating point arithmetic and games programming networking have little relevance for most web developers.

Joeri• 12 years ago

Floating point arithmetic is the only arithmetic if you're a web developer.

mschuster913• 12 years ago

Any website dealing with any form of sales/money WILL have to deal with FP arithmetic problems sooner or later!

kawliga• 12 years ago

SEO ???

hahahahaaha

laxatives• 12 years ago

Can anyone provide some good reads on the replaying leap second concept? Has anyone ever taken advantage of this? How do projects that rely on subsecond accuracy and syncronization resolve the issue?

edit: for anyone interested, there has never been a negative leap second (it's always been something like 23:59:59, 23:59:60, 00:00:00). see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Time_Protocol#Security_...

edit2: however, there are negative leap seconds in UNIX time. I wonder if there's a vulernability here? see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time#Leap_seconds

curiousDog• 12 years ago

There should also be an article about how every programmer should write without too many grammatical errors. Some of the emails I used to receive were borderline incomprehensible and I'd have to go battle it out in person.

ufo• 12 years ago

GOTO Considered Harmful

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_T...

If you actually read the letter you can see that it also applies to modern programming and not just to "goto". Its truly a timeless article that everyone should read (and its really short!)

mncolinlee• 12 years ago

One might argue that this classic article equally applies to callbacks.

You could read it as a manifesto for solutions to callback hell which do not mess up your program's state, such as reactive programming.

http://www.reactivemanifesto.org/

sliverstorm• 12 years ago

To really make something of the knowledge of memory & latency, an 11th article to get you thinking about how your program interacts with the cache:

http://research.scee.net/files/presentations/gcapaustralia09...

platz2• 12 years ago

For every article you tell me I must read, I'll be happy to demand you read 10 articles of my choosing in return.

krazydad• 12 years ago

Ken Thompson's Turing Award Lecture: "Reflections on Trusting Trust"

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

auvi• 12 years ago

This is part of the reading list of Stanford's CS PhD qualification. http://seclab.stanford.edu/SecurityQual.html

mabbo• 12 years ago

"Numbers every programmer should know"- Probably the most interesting part of that article is the slider. As you move it up and down, you can see how all the different things get faster over time.

... Except for the final one, "Packet Roundtrip". Networks have reached a physical limit of the universe, the speed of light.

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_laten...

tinco• 12 years ago

There is no law that says that information can not travel faster than light is there? The law is just a out mass/energy.

On top of that I believe faster than light transfer of information has already been experimentally shown to exist.

pdonis3• 12 years ago

There is no law that says that information can not travel faster than light is there?

Yes, there is. Information has to be carried by some form of mass/energy, so if mass/energy can't travel faster than light, neither can information.

I believe faster than light transfer of information has already been experimentally shown to exist.

No, it hasn't. If you're thinking of the CERN neutrino experiments a couple of years ago, that turned out to be an equipment error.

Terr_• 12 years ago

No, there are still some areas where we can make gains, practical speeds are still below c.

ggchappell2• 12 years ago

Perhaps we can back up a bit. The first reading I used to assign to my students back when I was teaching lower-level classes (I'm a C.S. prof.) is "On Following Rules" by Kirit Saelensminde.[1]

It's a quick, easy read. It makes a point that is important and not hard to understand, but that is often missed. And it provides a framework for dealing with the concepts you get from all those other articles you're supposed to read.

[1] http://www.kirit.com/On%20following%20rules

zorbo• 12 years ago

I'd like to add a rule 3: Don't impose or evangelize rules you don't fully understand.

ggchappell2• 12 years ago

Good idea.

Another way to think about it is that if someone doesn't understand a rule, then they are subject to the rule. If they do understand it, then the rule is subject to them.

Kirit is saying that, in the latter case (and only in that case) they get to decide whether to follow it.

One reason your idea works is that, in the first case, they don't get to assume that others are also subject to the rule.

Articles Every Programmer Should Read

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