I’ve been a software developer for some time now. I started with web development in 2004, moved to a full stack position in 2009 and began developing for iOS in 2013.

I began my professional journey by reading three books — one about HTML, one about CSS and one about SQL. The rest came from Google, Stack Overflow and blogs. The internet is amazing — as a young developer I was reading 5 or more articles every day. You can really find quality information that will get you to the level you want — for free.

My general programing knowledge comes mostly from my computer science degree and work experience. Yes. Turns out you learn a lot from just programming and facing different situation while working with different teams.

One thing I’ve always wanted to do is read more software development books, but there‘s an endless list of “Must Read Books For Developers”. The list of lists of “Must Read Books For Developers” isn’t small either…

Every book is great in its own right but there are just too many to read in one lifetime. Maybe two lifetimes even. This could get a little overwhelming and always prevented me from picking up my first book as a professional. Turns out — I’m not the only one.

I decided to do some digging and come up with as many lists as I could (18 lists were found) and make one “ultimate” list by ranking these books by number of appearances.

Reading the books on this list will not make you a great developer, but applying what you‘ve learned while gaining more programming experience — will. Personally, I will try to make it a habit to read at least one book every two months.

The full list contains 139 books and can be found via the link on the bottom of the page. The books featured in this post are the top books from that huge list. Got suggestions for other lists not included in the sources? Leave a comment and I’ll add it.

In this list you will not find a book that will teach you how to be a Java developer, but you may find a book that uses Java as the selected language for examples in order to teach you a general topic. You may find a specific language book that is considered good even for developers of other languages. I also included non-development books as long as they are considered a good read for developers (The Mythical Man-Month is a good example for that).