Useful Reference Books

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I get a lot of requests from readers about which books are best for learning MFC, ASP, ATL etc, but with hundreds of books coming out each year, and technology moving ahead in leaps and bounds, keeping up with what's best is hard. Which books have helped you the most?

Here's a list of faves sent in by readers. If you are just starting out in the industry then don't get lured into buying only books that deal with the language you are working in. Read books on how to program. You will save you and your employer a lot of stress. The "Programming Discipline and Design" section below lists a bunch of great books worth reading.

Programming Discipline and Design

Writing Solid Code - Steve Maguire
Mythical Man-Month - Frederick P. Brooks Jr
Code Complete - Steve McConnell
The Art of Computer Programming - Knuth
Algorithms - Robert Sedgewick
Debugging Applications - John Robbins
Taligent's Guide to Designing Programs - Taligent
Design Patterns - Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides
The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactices for an Imperfect World (Apress) - Christoper Duncan
Advanced Windows Debugging - Mario Hewardt, Daniel Pravat
Windows® Internals: Including Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, Fifth Edition (Pro Developer) - Mark Russinovich, David A. Solomon, Alex Ionescu

C / C++

The C Programming Language (Prentice Hall) - Kernigan and Ritchie
The C++ Programming Language - Bjarne Stroustroup
Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ - Bjarne Stroustroup
Effective and More Effective C++ - Scott Meyers
Inside Visual C++ - David J. Kruglinski
C++ How to Program - H. M. Deitel, P. J. Deitel
Thinking in C++ (2nd Ed) - Bruce Eckel

C#

A Programmer's Introduction to C#, 2nd edition (Apress) - Eric Gunnerson
Inside C#, 2nd edition (Microsoft Press) - Tom Archer
Component-Based Development with Visual C# (M&T books) - Ted Faison
C# Essentials, 2nd edition (O'Reilly) - Ben Albahari, Peter Drayton & Brad Merrill
C# in Depth - Jon Skeet
CLR via C#, 3rd Edition - Jeffrey Richter
C# Programming Language (Covering C# 4.0) - Anders Hejlsberg
Programming Entity Framework - Julia Lerman

ASP.NET

Debugging ASP.NET (New Riders) - Jonathon Goodyear, Brian Peek, Brad Fox
Designing Microsoft ASP.NET Applications (Microsoft Press) - Jonathon Goodyear, Brian Peek, Brad Fox
Debugging ASP.NET - Jonathon Goodyear, Brian Peek, Brad Fox
Microsoft ASP.NET Step by Step (Microsoft Press) - G. Andrew Duthrie
Deploying and Managing Microsoft .NET Web Farms (Sams) - Barry Bloom
Professional ASP.NET MVC 3 (Wrox) - Jon Galloway, Phil Haack, Brad Wilson, K. Scott Allen

Windows API

Programming Windows 95 - Charles Petzold and Paul Yao
Programming Applications for Windows - Jeffrey Richter
Advanced Windows - Jeffrey Richter
Visual C++ Windows Shell Programming - Dino Esposito

MFC

Programming Windows 95 with MFC - Jeff Prosise
MFC Internals - George Shepherd and Scot Wingo
Professional MFC with Visual C++ - Mike Blaszczak

ASP

Professional ASP Techniques for Webmasters - Alex Homer

Database

CE

Windows CE Developers Handbook - Terence A. Goggin
Programming Windows CE - Douglas Boling (Microsoft Press)
Essential Windows CE Application Programming -Robert Burdick (Wiley)

COM / DCOM / COM+ / ATL

Essential COM - Don Box
Professional COM Applications with ATL - Sing Li and Panos Economopoulos
Creating Lightweight Components with ATL - Jonathan Bates
Inside ALT - George Shepherd and Brad King
Understanding DCOM - William Rubin and Marshall Brain
Programming Distributed Applications with COM and Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 - Ted Pattison
Inside OLE, 2nd Edition - Kraig Brockschmidt

License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

About the Author

Chris Maunder

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The Code Project

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Chris is the Co-founder, Administrator, Architect, Chief Editor and Shameless Hack who wrote and runs The Code Project. He's been programming since 1988 while pretending to be, in various guises, an astrophysicist, mathematician, physicist, hydrologist, geomorphologist, defence intelligence researcher and then, when all that got a bit rough on the nerves, a web developer. He is a Microsoft Visual C++ MVP both globally and for Canada locally.

His programming experience includes C/C++, C#, SQL, MFC, ASP, ASP.NET, and far, far too much FORTRAN. He has worked on PocketPCs, AIX mainframes, Sun workstations, and a CRAY YMP C90 behemoth but finds notebooks take up less desk space.

He dodges, he weaves, and he never gets enough sleep. He is kind to small animals.

Chris was born and bred in Australia but splits his time between Toronto and Melbourne, depending on the weather. For relaxation he is into road cycling, snowboarding, rock climbing, and storm chasing.

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