The Best Books for Inspiring a Software Engineer

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I was just giving advice to someone who isn't sure software engineering is for him. My idea here was to send him to some of the books that inspired me to improve as a software engineer, and see if any of these authors enthusiasm rubbed off on him. Below is the list I came up with off the top of my head:

Donald Knuth, Literate Programming
P.J. Plauger, Programing on Purpose, Volumes I, II, and III
Jon Bentley, Programming Pearls and More Programming Pearls
Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike, The Practice of Programming
Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike, The UNIX Programming Environment
Brian Kernighan and P.J. Plauger, Software Tools in Pascal
James Coplien, Advanced C++
Mary and Tom Poppendieck, Lean Software Development

What else would you add to the list?

Comments

  1. Nathan Conroy9:01 PM

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    1. Nathan Conroy9:04 PM

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  2. Ken B10:23 PM

    Bertrand Meyer's book on Object Oriented Software Design.

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