Thinking Forth

This book was written in 1984, and is one of the greatest books I’ve read on computer programming practice (as opposed to theory). It’s one the books I wish I’d read 10 years ago. There is a lot in here, and I’m going to have to read it multiple times to truly assimilate it.

A lot about what I’ve read from here has been repeated and reimagined in later works such as “Extreme Programming” and “Refactoring“. I consider this substantial proof of the effectiveness of these practices. We all could use a refresher regularly, and reading the same thing in a different context helps solidify the study.

POODR

I have a hard-copy of this book, and it’s worth its weight in gold. It helped me grok object-oriented programming in a way I just didn’t get earlier. Since I professionally program mainly in Ruby, the examples were very helpful.

21st century C

I was gifted this book by a coworker of mine. I always considered C a difficult language to work with. This book has disabused me of that notion. I’m using the lessons from this book and “Thinking Forth” to build a CLI to JIRA right now. There will be a post on that in a bit.