Short articles

Most of these articles can be read in 10-20 minutes. This makes them ideal for utilizing time during commuting. Use a smartphone application like Pocket and Instapaper, or send them to your Kindle.

Basic programming skills

• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) by Joel Spolsky (~21k characters)
• The Law of Leaky Abstractions by Joel Spolsky (~13k characters)
• Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years by Peter Norvig (~15k characters)
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond (~94k characters. This essay is published as part of a book with the same name.)
• How To Become A Hacker by Eric S. Raymond (~57k characters)
• What Every Programmer Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic by Michael Borgwardt et al. (~22k characters)
• 10 Articles Every Programmer Must Read (a collection of articles)
• Why Does Programming Suck? (~41k characters)
• What Every Computer Science Major Should Know (a collection of articles)
• The Worst Mistake of Computer Science (~18k characters)
• Annulling The Billion Dollar Mistake (~7k characters)
• Dijkstra: Why numbering should start at zero (transcript) (~4k characters)

Specific skills

• The Twelve-Factor App by the Heroku team (~28k characters)
• Composition over Inheritance by Stephen Hurn (~15k characters)
• Machine Learning for Developers (~114k characters)
• The One True Way Of Indentation (~14k characters)
• Data Visualization by Claus O. Wilke (30 chapters)
• R for Data Science by Garrett Grolemund and Hadley Wickham (30 chapters)
• The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

Math articles with animated visualizations

• An Interactive Guide To The Fourier Transform
• How to Fold a Julia Fractal
• Visualizing Algorithms
• A visual introduction to machine learning
  • Part 1: A visual introduction to machine learning
  • Part 2: Model Tuning and the Bias-Variance Tradeoff
• Scientific Communication As Sequential Art, a redesign of Watts and Strogatz’s seminal Nature paper on network theory.
• The Wisdom and/or the Madness of Crowds, an interactive game.
• Pathfinding pages: pathfinding algorithms (BFS, Dijkstra, A*, …) visualized.

The attention economy

• In the Future, Our Attention Will Be Sold (~22k characters, 18 minutes)
• No, You Can’t Have It All (~8500 characters, 7 minutes)
• I Used to Be a Human Being (~40k characters)
• How I Got My Attention Back (~17k character, 14 minutes)
• Is Google Making Us Stupid (~25k characters)

In Hungarian:

• Tedd le a telefont egy kicsit. Ideje beszélgetni!
• Unatkozni jó, úgyhogy hagyjátok békén a gyerekeket, hadd unatkozzanak!

The “best programming language” religious war

• YourLanguageSucks

Books

A great proportion of the following books was published more than 15 years ago. Be sure to get the latest edition if you can.

Software engineering

• The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas (352 pages)
• Effective Java by Joshua Bloch (346 pages)
• Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin (464 pages)
• Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! by Miran Lipovača. Can be downloaded in PDF (176 pages)
• The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development by Chad Fowler (232 pages)
• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler et al. (464 pages)
• How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary by Robert L. Read (~40 pages), mirror

Project management

• Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister (272 pages)
• Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (288 pages, but the pages are small and the book only consists of <30k words)
• The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick P. Brooks (336 pages)

Mathematics

Books by magician and mathematician Raymond Smullyan:

• What Is the Name of This Book?, Hungarian: Mi a címe ennek a könyvnek?
• The Lady or the Tiger?, Hungarian: A hölgy vagy a tigris?
• The Riddle of Scheherazade, Hungarian: Seherezádé rejtélye

Light reads in mathematics:

• Fermat’s Last Theorem by Simon Singh, Hungarian: A nagy Fermat-sejtés
• The Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy, Hungarian: A prímszámok zenéje
• Péter Rózsa: Játék a végtelennel

Public speaking

• Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun (240 pages)

Presentations

• Scalability with an emphasis on software craftsmanship by Gergely Hodicska (@felhobacsi).

Research

• Extremely angry with the state of academic CS research right now (a through-provoking rant on CS research)
• You and Your Research by Richard Hamming (~78k characters)
• See also the [[PhD]] page.

Technologies

• How Hibernate Almost Ruined My Career (~15k characters)

Miscellaneous

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