10 programming books that will change your life

None of these books are good enough “to change your life”. Read “Structure an Interpretation of Computer Programs” instead and please and skip the rest. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

On the comment about reading Design Patterns leading to over-design. I would say just like any new fun skill you learn you tend to overuse it to the point of overkill initially. I did the same thing, but eventually you realize this, calm down and then just implement them in the fashion they were meant. It’s a must have skill if you are a Object-Oriented Programmer.

And here is the link: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/navLinks/fog0000000262.html

I would say your list show a focus toward mainstrain technology and WEB. And there even a book that has nothing to do with programming at all (Getting Things Done that I read myself).

But I would say books are “dangerous”. I would use the exemple of design patterns. At first, design patterns as presented in this book look like a good idea. They give you way of solving commonly found problems in your software.

In my experience, somebody that just learned design patterns tend to find them very interresting (it was sold to them that way), and tend to use them everywhere. They are viewed as some sort of universal strategy. Whereas in reality theses patterns where contextual to the authors design style and specific to their programming language and software domain. Theses Design pattern are focussed on fat client GUI using a classical OOP language.

Using too many patterns make for boilerplate, ceremony and overengineering. As we know code complexity and ownership cost of code is exponential with code size, this is a very bad idea.

So to balance things out, if you learn a book on design patterns, I think you should think about KISS (Keep It Stupid Simple) so you avoid to overdesign. You should also take a look at completely different way to design/build code so to see this theses OOP design pattern are not universal at all. Read something good about functional programming. Look at what you can do with Haskell, and the designs it favor. Look at what you can do with Lisp, and the designs it allows.

My 2 cents.