Stefan Bauer, M.A.

My Personal Top 10 Programming Books (2025)

But... why?

Overall, I own more than 120 books on software engineering and computer science. This might sound a little bit crazy, but I heavily invested training budget into books throughout my career. The reason is simply that I'm a book person. I love reading, I love writing, and I learn very efficiently with books. Books are generally of higher quality than most blog posts and they are distraction-free. So instead of investing into video courses, tools, and more conferences, I invested in books. It was a win-win situation for me. I got to keep them, and I enjoy reading those a lot.

Of course, I also love reading books not related to my job. Therefore, I didn't read all of my IT books yet. However, I read more than half of them, and I decided that's a fun reason to publish a list of my favorites. I hope you have as much fun browsing this list as I had creating it.

As a side note, I won't update this list. It only contains books I read until the end of 2025. Maybe I'll write another post like this in the future, though. Who knows?

My Personal Top 10

10 – 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Rank ten was probably the most difficult to decide on. It was either "100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them", "TypeScript Cookbook", or "PHP 8 Objects, Patterns, and Practice". All of them are simply excellent, and I'd recommend reading them. However, the Go book is just incredibly fun to read as well, and not as brain-twisty as the TypeScript book or as badly formatted as the PHP book. There's a certain feeling of "just one more mistake", because it's just so entertaining. Grab this one if you like Go, want to get better at it, and just love to feel the joy of programming.

9 – Domain-Driven Design Distilled

Learning about DDD has forever changed the way I organize my software projects. However, it's a very complex topic and not trivial to get into. Evan's book is a masterpiece, but it's difficult for beginners. Vaughn's "distilled" version, however, is highly digestible and I can't recommend it enough.

8 – Web Application Security

I expected a nice primer and got one hell of a book. McDonald's "Grokking Web Application Security" is almost as good. It's easier to understand for beginners, I think, but it also offers less depth. However, you can't go wrong with either of those books and I think every web professional should read at least one of them. It'll help you write much more secure code and do better code reviews.

7 – Grokking Algorithms

I think leet code is fun, because algorithms are kind of fun. However, they can get stressful if you have to learn them, probably for your next job interview. Having a book that explains complex things so nicely is worth it's weight in gold. Sure, "Cracking the Coding Interview" is the classic (and I love it), but "Grokking Algorithms" is probably the better book to get you started. Also, it's just fun to read.

6 – Software Engineering at Google

This book gets so incredibly high ratings everywhere because it's just that good. It teaches you a lot about software engineering as a profession, and about our industry as a whole. It also highlights how one of the tech giants tackles many problems that give all of us a headache from time to time. It's one of the books really every developer will profit from.

5 – The Software Engineer's Guidebook

Speaking of books that everyone should read, "The Software Engineer's Guidebook" will convince you to start working on your career. A former colleague and good friend recommended it to me, and I'm grateful for that. This book will help you to onboard and network more effectively, and it will teach you proper self reflection. Read it. You won't regret it.

4 – Head First Design Patterns

Software design patterns are just so important. We learn them at the beginning of our career, and they stick with us forever. A common language is so important when everything is highly abstract. The book looks a little bit quirky, and it's not as funny as it thinks it is, but it still does a great job at explaining design patterns and their usecases. Like the following books, reading this made me a better developer.

🥉 – The Clean Coder

Yeah, it's finally time for my top 3. And two of three medals go to Uncle Bob. I would have added Clean Craftsmanship: Disciplines, Standards, and Ethics, but I think "The Clean Coder" already covers most of the things that every professional should try to embrace. It also promotes the idea of taking pride in what you build. For me, that is an essential motivating factor.

🥈 – Clean Code

This is one of the first books on software development that I read, and it forever changed the way I code. Some prefer Ousterhout's "A Philosophy of Software Design" (and there's a great discussion between those books' authors available), but something about Uncle Bob's book just resonated with me. It got me to write tests, and it taught me to write better code in general. I can't recommend it enough. The audiobook is also good, which is rare.

🥇 – The Pragmatic Programmer

"The Pragmatic Programmer" does not only feature the best audiobook version of any IT book out there (even better than The Phoenix Project), it's also the best book on software ever written, hands down. No other book taught me so much and had so much influence on my work. And that's a bold statement, if you look at all the other books on this list. The book claims that "You’ll learn skills and develop habits and attitudes that form the foundation for long-term success in your career." And what can I say? It's just true.

Wrap up

Well, it was fun to write this down. I just finished compiling an overview of all my books and I just realized how much I love some of them. I think there's something for everyone in this list, and I hope you enjoyed reading it.

Cheers