Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers.

A user asked the following question “If you could go back in time and tell yourself to read a specific book at the beginning of your career as a developer, which book would it be?”

The answers to that question were varied and interesting. Charles Sprayberry curated the answers and created a site dedicated to this question, he named it as 100 Most Influential Books According to Stack Overflow. The following are the list of books.

• Code Complete (2nd edition) by Steve McConnell
• The Pragmatic Programmer
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie
• Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest & Stein
• Design Patterns by the Gang of Four
• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
• The Mythical Man Month
• The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth
• Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi and Jeffrey D. Ullman
• Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
• Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin
• Effective C++
• More Effective C++
• CODE by Charles Petzold
• Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley
• Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael C. Feathers
• Peopleware by Demarco and Lister
• Coders at Work by Peter Seibel
• Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
• Effective Java 2nd edition
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
• The Little Schemer
• The Seasoned Schemer
• Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby
• The Inmates Are Running The Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
• The Art of Unix Programming
• Test-Driven Development: By Example by Kent Beck
• Practices of an Agile Developer
• Don’t Make Me Think
• Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices by Robert C. Martin
• Domain Driven Designs by Eric Evans
• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
• Modern C++ Design by Andrei Alexandrescu
• Best Software Writing I by Joel Spolsky
• The Practice of Programming by Kernighan and Pike
• Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware by Andy Hunt
• Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art by Steve McConnel
• The Passionate Programmer (My Job Went To India) by Chad Fowler
• Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
• Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs
• Writing Solid Code
• JavaScript – The Good Parts
• Getting Real by 37 Signals
• Foundations of Programming by Karl Seguin
• Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice in C (2nd Edition)
• Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel
• The Elements of Computing Systems
• Refactoring to Patterns by Joshua Kerievsky
• Modern Operating Systems by Andrew S. Tanenbaum
• The Annotated Turing
• Things That Make Us Smart by Donald Norman
• The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander
• The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management by Tom DeMarco
• The C++ Programming Language (3rd edition) by Stroustrup
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
• Computer Systems – A Programmer’s Perspective
• Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C# by Robert C. Martin
• Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests
• Framework Design Guidelines by Brad Abrams
• Object Thinking by Dr. David West
• Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment by W. Richard Stevens
• Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
• The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
• CLR via C# by Jeffrey Richter
• The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander
• Design Patterns in C# by Steve Metsker
• Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carol
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
• About Face – The Essentials of Interaction Design
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky
• The Tao of Programming
• Computational Beauty of Nature
• Writing Solid Code by Steve Maguire
• Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing
• Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications by Grady Booch
• Effective Java by Joshua Bloch
• Computability by N. J. Cutland
• Masterminds of Programming
• The Tao Te Ching
• The Productive Programmer
• The Art of Deception by Kevin Mitnick
• The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World by Christopher Duncan
• Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case studies in Common Lisp
• Masters of Doom
• Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas with Matt Hargett
• How To Solve It by George Polya
• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
• Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation
• Writing Secure Code (2nd Edition) by Michael Howard
• Introduction to Functional Programming by Philip Wadler and Richard Bird
• No Bugs! by David Thielen
• Rework by Jason Freid and DHH
• JUnit in Action