Some book recommendations and dis-recommendations for the books I read in 2025.
The Pragmatic Programmer - David Thomas, Andrew Hunt
A well-organized book with great advice I thoroughly enjoyed. I recommend this book for devs early in their career.
The best bit of wisdom I got is the ETC principle which means easy to change. Things that are easy to change are good. The good things make things easy to change, like decoupling.
I appreciate how the advice is high-level, which trusts the reader to work out the details and not get bogged down in debates around whitespace or self-documenting code.
Atomic Habits - James Clear
An extremely well-known book. It’s actually good. Especially if you struggle to do the things you aim to do, or can’t stop doing the things you know you shouldn’t.
I wouldn’t treat the book as gospel; the 1% compounding rule doesn’t seem right. Overall the book is great. I found lots of ideas relate with “Hooked” by Nir Eyal, which I’ll post about later.
The Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu
Excellent sci-fi. Plus the next book in the series: “The Dark Forest” is great too. I watched the Netflix series first and still thoroughly enjoyed the books.
Discipline is Destiny - Ryan Holiday
At the risk of veering too much into self-help, I really resonated with Ryan Holiday’s work. It might just my point in life why I enjoyed the book. The increased amount of vice, cruelty, and dishonesty in the last decade surely helped too.
I kind of think Discipline is Destiny as a better version of “The Almanac of Naval Ravikant”, even though both are good reads and don’t serve the same purpose.
Code Complete - Steve McConnell
No, no, no! This book is a relic from the past from when OOP and Java were the new hot thing. I stupidly forced myself to finish this book which took almost 12 months. Most of the time was just skimming. Really low information density; it could have been 200 pages not 850.
There is some decent wisdom but good luck finding it when you’re bored out of your mind. Save yourself and avoid this book.
A really enjoyable fiction book. Listen to the audiobook as it has great voice acting that’s really necessary given the setting and characters.
Careless People - Sarah Wynn-Williams
An excellent peek behind the curtain. Makes you think about what type of person you want to be when getting richer yourself and being around rich and powerful people.