Hi, welcome to the brand new website, HN Reads. I enjoy reading Hacker News and I love buying books (and reading), and I also love data, so what better than doing some processing of data about books to find some interesting results?! It also gives me the opportunity to write about books that I find interesting. Here are the top 40 books recommended by HN readers in 2023. How I generated this list:

I came across this list and thought it might be interesting to the programming community here.

Which of these books have you read, or are on your list? Did any have a profound impact on your life? Were any a struggle to get through?

  • bugsmith@programming.devOP
    8·
    11 months ago

    I have read a few of these books. As for non-fiction:

    Pragmatic Programmer Excellent book; should be compulsory reading for all software developers.

    The Phoenix Project Enjoyable enough. It’s a fictional story and has some extremely role-cast, trope filled characters. But its purpose is not to be a great novel. Its purpose is to teach the history of and purpose of how dev-ops came about. I think it’s worth reading. I’m yet to try the Unicorn Project which I understand is actually more about software.

    Eloquent JavaScript I am not a huge fan of working with JavaScript or front end, but I did read this when I got placed on a long term project where I would be using it for the duration. I found this book excellent, and my JavaScript certainly benefitted from it.

    I also read a bunch of the fictional books. Bobiverse is one of my favourite series ever, despite the weirdness of the fourth book (it was still good). I’m just over halfway through Children of Time, and seriously regret not picking it up sooner. Well kind of, if I had I suppose I wouldn’t be enjoying it so much now!

  • spacedogroyEnglish
    6·
    11 months ago

    I’ve been reading Designing Data-Intensive Applications and it really is a great book, specifically for backend engineers.

    • bugsmith@programming.devOP
      1·
      11 months ago

      That one has been on my list for a while. Are you finding yourself able to easily apply what is taught to your day-to-day?

      • spacedogroyEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        A lot of it has reinforced my understanding around distributed databases and transactions. In my day-to-day, I’ve not really had need to use this knowledge as pretty much all our data stores are hosted in cloud platforms and we’re operating on low datasets and traffic.