Top 10 Career Changing Programming Books

When I graduated with a Computer Science degree ten years ago, I was excited to dive into the world of professional programming. I had done well in school, and I thought I was completely ready to be employed doing my dream job: writing code. What I discovered in my very first interview, however, was that I was massively underprepared to be an actual professional programmer. I knew all about data structures and algorithms, but nothing about how actual professional, "enterprise" software was written. I was lucky to find a job at a place willing to take a chance on me, and proceeded to learn as much as I could as quickly as I could to make up for my deficiencies. This involved reading a LOT of books.

Here I reflect on my 10-year experience programming professionally and all of the books I've read in that time, and offer up the ten that had the most profound impact on my career. Note that these are not the "10 best" programming books. I do feel all of these books are very good, but that's not the only reason I'm selecting them here; I'm mentioning them because I felt that I was a profoundly different person after reading each than I was beforehand. Each of these books forced me to think differently about my profession, and I believe they helped mold me into the programmer I am today.

None of these books are language books. I may feel like learning to program in, say, Scala, had a profound impact on how I work professionally, but the enlightening thing was Scala itself, not the book I used to help me learn it. Similarly, I'd say that learning to use Git had a significant impact on how I view version control, but it was Git that had the impact on me, not the book that I used to teach myself the tool. The books on this list are about the the content they dumped into my brain, not just a particular technology they taught me, even if a technology had a profound impact on me.

So, without further ado...