Engineering Reading List

Here is a list of books that I have found helpful to my development as a software engineer. This was originally developed for new hires and other junior engineers at my job.

Academic Textbooks

• Computer architecture: Structured Computer Organization by Tanenbaum. A bottom-up description of how a computer works, from the logic gates all the way up to high-level programming languages.
• Operating systems: Modern Operating Systems by Tanenbaum. Operating systems are just one chapter of the above computer architecture book. I would try reading the above book first and see if you like the author’s bottom-up style. If you do, and you want more detail on the operating system level, check this book out.
• Networking: Computer Networks by Tanenbaum and Wetherall. This is my favorite Tanenbaum book; it greatly improved my understanding of API design. Some people don’t like Tanenbaum's bottom-up approach, so you may prefer a different author.
• Other important subjects (I do not yet have book recommendations because I have not yet studied these areas): functional programming, programming languages, compilers.
• I do not recommend Tanenbaum's distributed systems book. I will update this list when I find a better reference for this important area.

Books on Professional Software Engineering

• Code Complete by McConnell. An excellent overall manual for good software engineering practices. Even if you don't read all (or any) of this book, you can use the bibliography of each chapter as a way to find many more books that focus on software engineering in a real-world corporate environment.
• Software Requirements by Beatty and Wiegers. More relevant for developers who are in the senior engineer/tech lead stage of their careers. It turns out that the hardest part of professional software engineering is often figuring out what needs to be done.

Books That I Plan to Read

• The Pragmatic Programmer by Thomas and Hunt
• Programming Pearls by John Bentley
• Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series
• The Art of Computer Programming series by Donald Knuth

Essential Book

And finally, I think every developer should have this book on their shelf and be generally familiar with its contents. If you took an algorithms class in college, you will already be familiar with a lot of this.

Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein. This book is often known as "CLRS" in the academic CS community.