Useful Reference Books

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 favs 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.

This page will be moved to a more appropriate section soon (and updated constantly) - but for the moment if you have any additional suggestions just post them in the comments section below!

Programming Discipline and Design

• Writing Solid Code - Steve Maguire
• Mythical Man-Month - Frederick P. Brooks Jr
• Code Complete - Steve McConnell
• The Art of 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

C / C++

• The C Programming Language (Prentice Hall) - Kernigan and Ritchie
• The C++ Programming Language - 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

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
• Depploying and Managing Microsoft .NET Web Farms (Sams) - Barry Bloom

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

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