Books like Open Source Licensing — picked by fans

When I work with students new to programming I often find they struggle with translating the toy problems in exercises to actually doing something in the real world.

I love this book and frequently recommend it to new programmers because it is centered around problems. Coding should be about making your life easier. At the beginning, the problems are small, but by the end, you’re learning about email, PDFs, and GUIs.

Sweigart has a great voice, and reading this feels like being guided by a friend rather than yet another coding textbook.

I have to be honest here: when I was reading this book on a trip to New York, I found myself quite surprised because I had seen so many praises for this book, yet I did not particularly agree with most of the topics I was reading about. In particular, I found several points that contradicted those in Clean Code and Code Complete.

I know there’s a debate going on between the authors on a distribution list, but besides some of these points on which I respectfully disagree with the author, I can see is a book of immense value, and there are tons of other great points made about great software design (for example, ”modules should be deep”). And the explanations are crystal clear.

A final reason for recommending this book is that it’s always enriching to expose oneself to a different viewpoint.

When helping software organizations be nimbler, I tend to stress two things: release more frequently and automate everything. Over the years, I’ve frequently got pushback from the database folks. Most DBAs and Data Architects are taught a very top-down approach and want all information upfront before creating a single table.

This book teaches how to apply abstraction layers that are common in programming but not as common in database design. The book showed me how to use versioned views to control the coding interface and upended my overall approach to designing databases.

Next to Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month, this is perhaps the most classic of all classic programming books.

The authors write: "Besides showing how to make effective use of the language, we have also tried where possible to illustrate useful algorithms and principles of good style and sound design."

The book is astoundingly practical as a tutorial, which is itself a testament to the Unix "pipe" model of programming: By page 13, they've introduced getchar and putchar, and by the end of Chapter 1, twenty pages later, you've implemented a host of useful utilities including cat, wc, and detab. In Chapter 5 you implement a function recognizable as the now-standard qsort; in Chapter 8 you implement malloc itself.

Now, I recommend "K&R1," not the more popular "K&R2." The first edition was issued in 1978 at a slim 225 pages; the second edition, a decade later, added conformance with ANSI… show more.

This book is the “bible” of Federal Indian Law. Mr. Cohen was appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and was the first pro-Native Commissioner to hold that post. He took it upon himself and his agency to publish a treatise that Indian tribes and others could rely on to learn about treaties, statutes, and agreements that set forth the rights of Indian tribes and their members.

It’s been updated several times. It is the most authoritative text in the field and is frequently cited by courts and commentators. It doesn’t lend itself to easy reading, however. (My book synthesizes the information contained in the Cohen book and makes it understandable to the non-lawyer.)

Due to its global nature and reach, some people think that because the internet knows no borders, it also does not have limits. This concept is wrong. Goldsmith and Wu tell the fascinating story of the internet's challenges to governmental rule. They ask: who is really in control of the internet? And does the internet liberate us from government, borders, and even our physical selves? In a lively prose, the authors peppered their arguments with real-life examples concerning disagreements between giants of the internet and democratic and authoritarian governments. They show that governments have been asserting their power to direct the future of the internet.

Internet intermediaries have to filter content geographically to comply with local law for a small fraction of their communications. This imposes costs on them, and forces them to adjust to this cost of business. But in light of the internet’s many advantages, the authors argue… show more.

I’ve enjoyed most of Grisham’s novels, but I’m picking this legal thriller (as are most of his books) because of the fascinating plot. It’s a David vs. Goliath story, in which the underdogs are seeking righteous justice from a huge corporation by using the legal court system. The planning involved to make it happen and the attempts by the opposition to destroy the effort gives an inside-baseball look at how multi-million dollar lawsuits are put together. The book also made a great movie!

I grew up as a competitive swimmer and struggled to put words to some of the feelings I had around being a female athlete, especially given how disconnected I felt from the history of women’s sports. This book hits both of those topics as the author shares her experience as a soccer player—to the point that I had to put down the book every once in a while and just sigh with relief.

Plus, the historical look at Title Nine was so informative and, quite frankly, shocking. 

I love this book because it reminds me how much of criminal justice history ultimately comes down to ordinary people refusing to give up.

Gideon was not powerful, wealthy, educated, or politically connected. Yet his handwritten petition transformed the constitutional right to counsel in America. As both a lawyer and teacher, I find this story endlessly inspiring because it shows how fragile and unfinished our legal protections really are.

I have recommended this book to students for years because it captures why the right to counsel matters in human terms rather than abstract doctrine.

This book also deserves more attention than it has received. And it, too, is a corrective. Taking to task a host of biographers and historians who have pretended that the “founding fathers” were blind to slavery and that slavery was a secondary issue in 1787, Finkleman contends that slavery was always a major bone of contention. Moreover, contends Finkelman, Thomas Jefferson was anything but an antislavery man. Instead, he was on the proslavery and anti-Black side in most controversies.