Useful Reference Books

I get a lot of requests from readers about which books are best for learning MFC, ASP, ATL, etc., but with hundreds of books coming out each year, and technology moving ahead in leaps and bounds, keeping up with what's best is hard. Which books have helped you the most?

Here's a list of faves sent in by readers. If you are just starting out in the industry then don't get lured into buying only books that deal with the language you are working in. Read books on how to program. You will save you and your employer a lot of stress. The "Programming Discipline and Design" section below lists a bunch of great books worth reading.

Programming Discipline and Design

• Writing Solid Code - Steve Maguire
• Mythical Man-Month - Frederick P. Brooks Jr
• Code Complete - Steve McConnell
• The Art of Computer Programming - Knuth
• Algorithms - Robert Sedgewick
• Debugging Applications - John Robbins
• Taligent's Guide to Designing Programs - Taligent
• Design Patterns - Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides
• The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactices for an Imperfect World (Apress) - Christoper Duncan
• Unite The Tribes - Christopher Duncan
• Advanced Windows Debugging - Mario Hewardt, Daniel Pravat
• Windows® Internals: Including Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, Fifth Edition (Pro Developer) - Mark Russinovich, David A. Solomon, Alex Ionescu
• The Pragmatic Programmer - Andrew Hunt & David Thomas
• The Psychology of Computer Programming - Gerald Weinberg

• Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices - Robert C. Martin
• Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship - Robert C. Martin
• The Art of Unit Testing: With Examples in .Net - Roy Osherove
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture - Martin Fowler
• Domain-Specific Languages - Martin Fowler
• Continuous Delivery - Martin Fowler

• Application Architecture Guide, 2nd Edition - Microsoft patterns & practices
• The Developer’s <code> - Ka Wai Cheung
• An Introduction to Software Architecture - Ka Wai Cheung
• Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software - Eric Evans

IoT (Internet of Things)

• The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin
• Designing the Internet of Things by Adrian McEwen & Hakim Cassimally
• Designing Multi-Device Experiences: An Ecosystem Approach to User Experiences across Devices by Michal Levin
• Building Internet of Things with the Arduino (Volume 1) by Charalampos Doukas
• Enabling Things to Talk: Designing IoT solutions with the IoT Architectural Reference Model by Alessandro Bassi, Martin Bauer, Martin Fiedler, Thorsten Kramp, Rob van Kranenburg, Sebastian Lange & Stefan Meissner
• From Machine-to-Machine to the Internet of Things: Introduction to a New Age of Intelligence by Jan Holler, Vlasios Tsiatsis, Catherine Mulligan, Stefan Avesand, Stamatis Karnouskos & David Boyle
• The Silent Intelligence - The Internet of Things by Daniel Kellmereit & Daniel Obodovski
• Getting Started with the Internet of Things: Connecting Sensors and Microcontrollers to the Cloud by Cuno Pfister

C / C++

• The C Programming Language (Prentice Hall) - Kernigan and Ritchie
• The C++ Programming Language - Bjarne Stroustroup
• Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ - Bjarne Stroustroup
• C++ Coding Standards (101 Rules, Guidelines and Best Practices) - Herb Sutter, Andrei Alexandrescu
• Effective C++, More Effective C++ and Effective Modern C++ - Scott Meyers
• Exceptional C++ and More Exceptional C++ - Herb Sutter
• C++ Common Knowledge - Stephen C. Dewhurst
• Large Scale C++ Software Design - John Lakos
• Inside Visual C++ - David J. Kruglinski
• C++ How to Program - H. M. Deitel, P. J. Deitel
• Thinking in C++ (2nd Ed) - Bruce Eckel

C#

• A Programmer's Introduction to C#, 2nd edition (Apress) - Eric Gunnerson
• Inside C#, 2nd edition (Microsoft Press) - Tom Archer
• Component-Based Development with Visual C# (M&T books) - Ted Faison
• C# Essentials, 2nd edition (O'Reilly) - Ben Albahari, Peter Drayton & Brad Merrill
• C# in Depth - Jon Skeet
• CLR via C#, 3rd Edition - Jeffrey Richter
• C# Programming Language (Covering C# 4.0) - Anders Hejlsberg
• Programming Entity Framework - Julia Lerman
• C# 5.0 In a Nutshell: The Definitive Reference - Joseph Albahari & Ben Albahari

• C# Yellow Book 2012 - Rob Miles

ASP.NET

• Debugging ASP.NET (New Riders) - Jonathon Goodyear, Brian Peek, Brad Fox
• Designing Microsoft ASP.NET Applications (Microsoft Press) - Jonathon Goodyear, Brian Peek, Brad Fox
• Microsoft ASP.NET Step by Step (Microsoft Press) - G. Andrew Duthrie
• Deploying and Managing Microsoft .NET Web Farms (Sams) - Barry Bloom
• Professional ASP.NET MVC 3 (Wrox) - Jon Galloway, Phil Haack, Brad Wilson, K. Scott Allen 
• Beginning ASP.NET 4.5 in C# - Matthew MacDonald

Windows API

• Programming Windows 95 - Charles Petzold and Paul Yao
• Programming Applications for Windows - Jeffrey Richter
• Advanced Windows - Jeffrey Richter
• Visual C++ Windows Shell Programming - Dino Esposito

MFC

• Programming Windows 95 with MFC - Jeff Prosise
• MFC Internals - George Shepherd and Scot Wingo
• Professional MFC with Visual C++ - Mike Blaszczak

ASP

• Professional ASP Techniques for Webmasters - Alex Homer

Database

• An Introduction to Database Systems (8^th Edition)
• Fundamentals of Database Systems (6^th Edition)
• Database: Principles, Programming, and Performance, Second Edition (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)
• Joe Celko's Data, Measurements and Standards in SQL (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Unleashed
• Inside Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008: T-SQL Programming (Pro-Developer)
• Oracle Essentials: Oracle Database 11g
• Oracle PL/SQL Programming: Covers Versions Through Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (Animal Guide)

DELPHI

• Coding in Delphi by Nick Hodges
• Delphi XE2 Foundations by Chris Rolliston
• Delphi Component Design by Danny Thorpe
• Delphi in a Nutshell by Ray Lischner
• The Tomes of Delphi: Developer's Guide to Troubleshooting by B. Clay Shannon

CE

• Windows CE Developers Handbook - Terence A. Goggin
• Programming Windows CE - Douglas Boling (Microsoft Press)
• Essential Windows CE Application Programming -Robert Burdick (Wiley)

COM / DCOM / COM+ / ATL

• Essential COM - Don Box
• Professional COM Applications with ATL - Sing Li and Panos Economopoulos
• Creating Lightweight Components with ATL - Jonathan Bates
• Inside ALT - George Shepherd and Brad King
• Understanding DCOM - William Rubin and Marshall Brain
• Programming Distributed Applications with COM and Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 - Ted Pattison
• Inside OLE, 2nd Edition - Kraig Brockschmidt

WPF / Silverlight / Windows Phone / WinRT

• Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed - Adam Nathan
• Pro WPF In Visual Studio x - Matthew MacDonald
• Windows Phone Unleashed - Daniel Vaughan
• Silverlight x Unleashed - Laurent Bugnion
• Programming Windows - Charles Petzold (yes, he's done a Windows 8 version)
• Building Windows 8 Apps with C# and XAML - Jeremy Likness

OOP (Object-Oriented Programming)

• Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design - Brett D. McLaughlin, Gary Pollice, and Dave West

Web Pages/WebMatrix

• Beginning ASP.NET Web Pages with WebMatrix - Mike Brind and Imar Spaanjaars
• Building ASP.NET Web Pages with Microsoft WebMatrix - Steve Lydford

WINDOWS 8 DEVELOPMENT

• Windows 8 Apps with XAML and C# Unleashed - Adam Nathan
• Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript - Kraig Brockschmidt

JavaScript/jQuery

• JavaScript & jQuery: The Missing Manual - David Sawyer McFarland
• Murach's JavaScript and jQuery by Zak Ruvalcaba and Mike Murach

• Building A JavaScript Framework - dailyjs

HTML

• HTML5 24-Hour Trainer - Joseph W. Lowery and Mark Fletcher
• HTML & CSS: The Good Parts - Ben Henick
• Responsive Web Design - Ethan Marcotte

CSS

• CSS3: The Missing Manual - David Sawyer McFarland

AJAX

• Unobtrusive Ajax - Jesse Skinner

Android

• Introduction to Android Application Development: Android Essentials - Joseph Annuzzi Jr., Lauren Darcey, Shane Conder
• Beginning Android Tablet Application Development - Wei-Meng Lee
• Programming Android - Zigurd Mednieks, Laird Dornin, G. Blake Meike, and Masumi Nakamura
• Android Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach - Dave Smith and Jeff Friesen

Android Studio

• Android Studio Application Development - Belén Cruz Zapata
• Getting Started with Android Studio - Barbara Hohensee
• Android Studio: How to guide and tutorial - Clive Sargeant
• Android Developer Tools Essentials: Android Studio to Zipalign - Mike Wolfson, Donn Felker

Matlab

OpenCV

Regular Expressions

Security

• Introduction to Pattern Recognition A Matlab Approach - Sergios Theodoridis and konstantinos koutroumbas
  • Learning OpenCV Computer Vision - Gary Bradski and Adrian Kaehler
  • OpenCV.2. Computer.Vision.Application. Programming.Cookbook - Robert Laganière
  • OpenCVReferenceManual - Intel
  • Mastering Regular Expressions - Jeffrey Friedl
  • Beginning ASP.NET Security - Barry Dorrans
  • SQL Injection Attacks and Defense - Justin Clarke