Software Engineering at Google
by Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, Hyrum Wright · first published 2020
72% recommend28% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Covers software engineering practices at large scale, drawing on Google's experience with long-lived code, maintenance, and team processes. For engineers wanting to see how code and teams hold up over time.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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These are the books that IMO felt worth really carefully digesting: Software engineering practices: - Designing Data-Intensive Applications - Site Reliability Engineering - Software Engineering at Google - Designing Event-Driven Systems - The Data-Centric Revolution - Code Complete - Data Management at Scale Self-help: - So Good They Can't Ignore You - Deep Work - A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel…
on “Ask HN: Which books you have read till now that were worth investing time in?” ↗…System (VCS). We use it every minute of our working day) 8. Your Code as a Crime Scene (Finding problems in the code using code history) 9. Data-Intensive Applications (Databases are everywhere) 10. Software Engineering at Google (Addressing the biggest scaling problems) Honorable Mentions: 1. Clean Code (Writing code that is easy to understand by other developers) 2. The Soft Skills (Coding alone is not enough to be a great…
on “Ask HN: Top 10 Timeless Software Books That ChangedLife as Software Engineer?” ↗…Patterns First Principles of Interaction Design (Revised & Expanded) The Dragon book Database Systems: Design, Implementation, & Management K&R C Code Complete Working Effectively with Legacy Code Software Engineering at Google Site Reliability Engineering -- Also, learn these, at least to a novice level: -- Crystal Java Clojure Haskell OCaml Erlang Elixir Rust C x86 assembly bash, JS, CSS, HTML, SQL, Python and…
on “Books I recommend to my software engineering students” ↗My favourite is about software engineering in general: - Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time by Titus Winters Another good one is "Real-World Cryptography" by David Wong
on “Ask HN: Best Programming Books of 2020?” ↗- Philosophy of Software Design (great short read packed with insight) - Mythical Man-Month (the classic, a little outdated but the principles still ring very true) - Software Engineering at Google (thoughts from a company that has spent a lot of time thinking about this at scale)
on “Ask HN: Best books on managing software complexity?” ↗…spreadsheet: <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kgFSWp7rM3ZegweXAoMN...> From my perspective, the top "must-reads" are: -- John K Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design -- Titus Winter (et al), Software Engineering at Google -- Hanson and Sussman, Software Design for Flexibility Other interesting titles that caught my eye: -- Peter Naur, Programming as Theory Building -- Scott Wlaschin, Domain Modeling Made Functional…
on “Ask HN: Best books on managing software complexity?” ↗No that’s not a mock that’s a stub. See this book from software engineers at Google, it talks about various test doubles: https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch13.html
on “Testing Without Mocks” ↗“Software Engineering at Google” has been eye opening for me. It hits what you are looking for in its first chapter and then goes into details of different aspects in later chapters. https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book
on “Ask HN: Best books on managing software complexity?” ↗This part is good: https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch13.html#prefer_r...
on “Software Engineering at Google” ↗Take a look at https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch12.html
on “Ask HN: Why focus on unit tests over end-to-end tests?” ↗It's programming if "clever" is a compliment, but it's software engineering if "clever" is an accusation. SWE book puts it really well. https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book
on “Writing maintainable code is a communication skill” ↗Read the engineering blogs of big companies like Google, Netflix, Dropbox, etc. and especially read papers they publish. Google has a book out now about its software engineering practices too--although it's not specifically on architecture you can glean a ton of info about how Google services work internally from its software processes: https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book
on “Ask HN: Where can I see many examples of real companies' software architecture?” ↗"Software engineering at Google" (O'Reilley) has a lot of "team focused" advice also, it's overall pretty non-technical but generally a good read. Free to read online too https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book
on “Ask HN: Reading material on how to be a better software engineer?” ↗Software Engineering at Google has lots of valuable advice and best practices to accomplish this - https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/toc.html
on “Grokking Big Unfamiliar Codebases” ↗If they find the appeal to authority useful, I'd grab them a copy of _Software Engineering at Google_ and leave them a bookmark in "Help Me Hide My Code". You can find the text here: https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch02.html#help_me_... (disclaimer: work there, but wasn't involved in the book at all)
on “Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems” ↗