Goodreads

Books

• 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know (EN)
• Kathrin Passig, Johannes Jander – Weniger schlecht programmieren (DE)
• Martin Fowler with Kent Beck – Refactoring, Improving the Design of Existing Code (EN)
• Peter Seibel – Coders At Work (EN)
• Bill Karwin – SQL Antipatterns (EN)
• Eric Evans – Domain-Driven Design, Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software (EN)
• Joshua Bloch – Effective Java, 3rd Edition
• Rob Conery – The Imposter's Handbook: Essential CS Skills and Concepts for Self-Taught Programmers
• Michael Nygard – Release It! Second Edition
• Kevin Behr, George Spafford, Gene Kim – The Phoenix Project
• Martin Kleppmann – Designing Data-Intensive Applications
• Marianne Bellotti – Kill It With Fire
• DevOps Tools for Java Developers (Various authors)
• Dan McQuillan – Resisting AI, An anti-fascist approach to artificial intelligence (One of the most important books in the field of AI in 2023 and later)
• John Romero – DOOM Guy: Life in First Person (Great insights into quite a different part of our industry than the one I am participating in. Great focus on positive aspects, reassuring that there are humble engineers still in the industry)
• James Stanier – Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager (See commit as minireview)
• Rainer Mühlhoff – Künstliche Intelligenz und der neue Faschismus (One of the best German summaries of not only AI and the rise of modern fascism and its roots in the tech-culture, but especially the combination of these two and how it does affect society for the worse. It is a loud cry to keep multiple futures alive, and not only one.)

Problemsolver

I'd call those books "Problemsolver". You might not read them from front to back but as a reference for specific problems.

• Thorben Jansen – Hibernate Tips, More than 70 solutions to common Hibernate problems
• Simon Harrer, Jörg Lenhard, Linus Dietz – Java by Comparison

Non-IT

These are non IT specific books, but touch essential things in our business. Either the way we work together or address some common misconceptions, for example sleep being an optional aspect to live:

• Richard Sennett – Together.The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation
• Matthew Walker – Why We Sleep
• Robin DiAngelo – White Fragility (A recommended read for all white developers and a good starter to understand why we need to work actively against racism and not manifest structural racism in our software based solutions)
• Jonathan Taplin – The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto (Proper eye-opener, with a lot of history and a semi-optimistic outlook)
• Arnold Schwarzenegger – Be Useful: Sieben einfache Regeln für ein besseres Leben

Work in general

• Gavin Mueller – Breaking Things At Work: The Luddites Were Right About Why You Hate Your Job (I don't hate my job, quite the contrary, but this book is both a good history whirlwind and a reassurance that I am not the only one who struggles to understand ongoing automation, enshittification and in general, making billionaires richer by making us all poorer and less autonomous)
• James Muldoon, Mark Graham, Callum Cant – Feeding the Machine. Hinter den Kulissen der KI-Imperien (An outstanding book that for a change does not touch on the general AI slop that is replacing basically any content out there, but instead focuses on the machine that produces the AI machine and the resources needed for it to work: Human work, intellect and skill. The moments it discusses the output of the "extraction machine", it especially discusses the fact that AI is used on a massive scale for both work-surveillance of aforementioned cheap labor aka clickworkers and more and more in the global north and AI in times of war. AI in times of war doesn't meean smarter bombs, but as basically with everything else, more output. Here: more targets.)

Essays and other articles

Best practices

• Jonathan Giles – Java Best Practices
• Jon P Smith – What makes a good software library?

Architecture

• Beate Ritterbach – Vererbung: für Objekte nützlich, für Werte gefährlich (DE)
• Oliver Gierke – Whoops! Where did my architecture go (EN)
• Mark Seemann – Domain modelling with REST(EN)

Concepts

• John McClean – Trampolining: a practical guide for awesome Java Developers (EN)

Philosophy

• Edsger W. Dijkstra – The Humble Programmer (EN)

My library

all.csv contains an incomplete list of books in my library. The CSV file has 6 columns separated by ,.

Interacting with the CSV file

Using SQLite to query the database

sqlite3 :memory: \
 '.mode csv' \
 '.separator ,' \
 '.import "|curl -s https://codeberg.org/michael-simons/goodreads/raw/branch/main/all.csv" books' \
 "SELECT title FROM books WHERE author like '%King%' ORDER by title"

Using DuckDB

DuckDB is an incredible versatile, in-process SQL OLAP database management system and while most likely total overkill for the small dataset, it's fun. Install and start DuckDB:

-- Required to directly import the csv file from Github
INSTALLhttpfs;-- Just query the dataset
SELECTDISTINCTauthorFROMread_csv('https://codeberg.org/michael-simons/goodreads/raw/branch/main/all.csv',header=true,auto_detect=true);-- Create a table named books
CREATETABLEbooksASSELECT*FROMread_csv('https://codeberg.org/michael-simons/goodreads/raw/branch/main/all.csv',header=true,auto_detect=true);-- Query and manipulate as needed
-- Save the result (overwriting all.csv and sorting it on the way)
COPY(SELECT*FROMbooksORDERBYauthorCOLLATEdeASC,titleCOLLATEdeASC)TO'all.csv'WITH(headertrue);

Of course, a one shot query like the one above printing all books by Stephen King, is possible too:

duckdb --noheader --list -s "
SELECT title FROM read_csv('https://codeberg.org/michael-simons/goodreads/raw/branch/main/all.csv', header=true, auto_detect=true)
WHERE author like '%King%' ORDER by title"

Tip

Shameless self-advertising: I wrote a book about DuckDB with a couple of friends, called DuckDB in Action and it's available at Manning or on Amazon. If you like some nice SQL, Python and Java, have a look.

Using Neo4j

I used to run a browseable, interactive list of all books on Heroku using a free Neo4j AuraDB instance, but Heroku stopped offering a free service a while ago. The repository containing the application code (based on Quarkus) is still available: neo4j-aura-quarkus-graphql project. Follow the instruction in the README.

The essential query to import the CSV into Neo4j looks like this

LOAD CSV WITH HEADERS FROM 'https://codeberg.org/michael-simons/goodreads/raw/branch/main/all.csv' AS row FIELDTERMINATOR ','
MERGE (b:Book {
 title: trim(row.Title)
})
SET b.type = row.Type, b.state = row.State
WITH b, row
UNWIND split(row.Author, '&') AS author
WITH b, split(author, ',') AS author
WITH b, ((trim(coalesce(author[1], '')) + ' ') + trim(author[0])) AS author
MERGE (a:Person {
 name: trim(author)
})
MERGE (a)-[r:WROTE]->(b)
WITH b, a
WITH b, collect(a) AS authors
RETURN id(b) AS id, b.title, b.state, authors

Using xsv

xsv is a powerful tool for manipulating CSV. Here's an example how to get a list of unique authors

curl -s https://codeberg.org/michael-simons/goodreads/raw/branch/main/all.csv | \
 xsv select -d "," Author |\
 uniq

Using the webui

If you have JBang installed you can start an admin "UI" like this:

jbang admin.java

Access the page at localhost:8080.