Must Read of books for a programmer?

Question

Can anyone tell me what are the must read books for a person who wants to successful career in software?
I was suggested by my friend to study SOFTWARE ENGINEERING, which is a very fundamental self taught book i should read.

I m not asking programming books, rather i m asking list of general titles like software engineering which will help to understand the insights of software industry,

Answer 1

You are approaching this completely from the wrong angle. You need to learn a programming language well, before you can appreciate more theoretical books. Once you develop code for a living the next question becomes software development lifecycle or methodology and design.

One book that does a good job trying to show you best practices while you learn is the Java books by Deitel and others. There's a Java and enterprise java book that both teach the language and teach design using UML.

I really don't think those types of things start to sink in for most people until they've been developers for a while.

One book that has become a staple of comp science study is this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns

Again I think this would be a hard book to read for most people who aren't already practicing OOP developers. With that said design patterns are very important in modern software development.

Answer 2

* Head First Design Patterns, O'Reilly, Freeman and Freeman. Excellent, accessible book on Design Patterns and general object-oriented design guidelines. See amazon reviews. * Head First Design Patterns web site, including Java examples (in a jar file).Design Patterns by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides. Addison-Wesley, 1995. (This is the original and classic text on the subject. It is a very good book which you will find yourself referring to for many years to come. But it is a challenging read, and the code examples are in C++)

Answer 3

Anything from O'Reilly is great.