Book and course references

Book and course references

A short list of really good books for Software Engineers

This is a list of books and courses that one may find pertinent to several areas of software development. Please note that, even though this is an article, this is a "living list" which will be updated from time to time. Furthermore, of course, there are many more great books out there.

Team Lead

Team lead, tech lead... these positions have similar responsibilities and there is no clear definition on the market of what is what. Regardless, a management and technical component is always involved, and that is what these references below are about.

Books

Quality Engineer

Quality Engineer goes from someone who does manual testing to an engineer who develops automated ones. Finding references for this position is not easy.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did not read the books nor took the courses from this section, however, I got very good recommendations, thus I am putting them here.

Books

Courses

Software Engineer

In one word it means a programmer. It could be backend, frontend developer, SRE Engineer, or whatever other position for someone who builds code and handles infrastructure.

Code and best practices books

Microservices

Per this reference, microservices can be defined as:

Microservices are an architectural and organizational approach to software development where software is composed of small independent services that communicate over well-defined APIs. These services are owned by small, self-contained teams.

Books

Courses

Amazon Web Services

Per the amazon website, AWS means

AWS is designed to allow application providers, ISVs, and vendors to quickly and securely host your applications – whether an existing application or a new SaaS-based application. You can use the AWS Management Console or well-documented web services APIs to access AWS's application hosting platform.

Courses

Algorithms

Hopefully, this is self-explanatory, but here it means references to subjects like data structures, sorting, graph algorithms, etc.

Books

Courses

  • Algorithms: part 1 - Coursera - this is the best algorithm course I took. it is free, and the exercises are awesome. I do recommend it. There is the "part 2" of this course, but I did not take it.

Artificial Inteligence

This is not very easy to define, so please read this post for a lengthy description of the theme. Unfortunately, not too many references are provided here.

Courses

Software Architecture

Books

  • System Design Interview – An insider's guide - this book is surprisingly good. It is short, yet very well elaborated. It is recommended not only for job interviews but mostly for the ones who wish to learn more about software architecture in general.

Cryptography

Here is a very nice definition:

Cryptography is the study of secure communications techniques that allow only the sender and intended recipient of a message to view its contents. The term is derived from the Greek word kryptos, which means hidden.

Courses

  • Cryptography 1 - Coursera - I do not know much about cryptography in general, but this course was amazing. I think it was the hardest course I took, but quite worth it. If one truly wishes to understand cryptography, this course will teach you everything you need to know. There is also the "part 2", but I did not take it.