What to read to the programmer at your leisure

If you read English well, set aside specifications and tutorials. Take a break from the next workbook on the next framework and programming language. I bring to your attention my personal list of books about programming, which are pleasant to read at your leisure: an interesting story, life stories, instructive experience.

Dreaming in code

The book is about the development of personal manager Chandler . Reading this book will give you real pleasure from the feeling of pain. You will be ashamed of the heroes of this book, for the time spent meaninglessly, for the crippled fate and a huge pile of money that has flown into the pipe.

A truly instructive reading about the fact that a millionaire (Mitch Kapor), who broke the bank on his first program, does not automatically become a management genius and an open-source prophet. As for how to write code, you must first do at least something with the design. Before collecting programmers, it is necessary to somehow shape your idea into words. Two dozen programmers, one and a half thousand bugs in the baglist, five years of exploitation and fantasy, proclamation and idle talk, puffing up cheeks and self-promotion. At the exit - a stillborn miscarriage, which was disgusted even by the creators.

The cuckoo's egg

Great book from the mid 80s. Almost a spy story about hackers, military secrets, hacking networks, security holes, tracking calls.

The story in the book is the astronomer Cliff Stoll , who by chance became the system administrator at the University of Berkeley. Considering the logs, he noticed a discrepancy in the budget of used computer time in the size of 75 cents. After this, the story unfolds as a detective on the verge of a farce in which the FBI, the NSA, military counterintelligence, the CIA and even the astronomer’s wife participate. From the book you will learn many interesting things about how the US intelligence agencies evaluated cyber threats in the mid-80s (that is, they did not evaluate them at all), what works it cost to convince them of the reality of the threat and force them to move or at least assist. The story is real, occurred at the end of the Cold War.

After this incident, Cliff Stoll did not become an expert in computer security systems. He continued to study astronomy, but still gives interviews that can be viewed on Youtube.

Showstopper

An interesting story about creating WindowsNT. From the book you will learn not only historical facts, but also get to know how and who made historical decisions at Microsoft, what obstacles were in this gigantic project.

Disrupted

The hero of the book is the journalist of Newsweek magazine, who led the section with reviews on technological topics. In 2009, when the American economy was experiencing a difficult financial crisis, it was kicked out of a staff reduction magazine. As a result, in his 50th birthday, a man was out of work and without a prospect of finding it: all paper magazines were cutting staff.

As a last chance, a journalist got a job at HubSpot , a startup associated with Internet marketing. In his book, the author in very caustic words describes the entire boom of start-ups as a phenomenon close to fraud and an artificially inflated bubble. How startups powder young brains, how people are recruited and how they are treated, how venture capitalists will not always remain in the bargain even with a bad IPO, and employees - option recipients - without money, working practically for food.

See this book as a sober skeptical look, like a cold shower, if you are fooled by someone, luring you into a "fast-growing promising company", promising mountains of gold in the form of options that will make you a billionaire tomorrow.