Best First Books for Programming Languages
October 13, 2009
As a followup to my previous entry, this is the list of first books I wholly recommend to learn programming languages:
- C
- K & R
- Clojure
- Programming Clojure
- Erlang
- Programming Erlang
- JavaScript
- JavaScript: The Good Parts
- Lisp
- The Little Schemer
- Objective-C
- Cocoa Programming with Mac OS X 1
- Python
- Dive into Python 2
- Ruby
- Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby
- Smalltalk
- Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns
These books are not necessarily the most complete references and they do not cover all features offered by the languages but I found that they gave me the best insight to understand and think with these languages.
One language I did not list is Java. I have used Java for so long that the last introduction book I read was for version 1.2. Which book would you recommend to learn Java?
- This is more than just Objective-C but I found that learning Cocoa stuff really make the language shine. ↩
- I have not read Dive into Python 3 yet but I bet it is as good or even better than Dive into Python ↩