Books are a valuable source of information, no matter what you've listened about them nowadays. In recent years I've noticed a movement against them and some of the reasons they show are:

• Quickly become obsolete
• Books are hard to transport
• I get bored reading them
• I can't finish my reading
• They are expensive
• The moth eats them 😂

Ok, the last point was a joke 😁, but let's analyze those ideas one by one: About the thing that they become obsolete I do not agree, the same thing could be said about video tutorials and online courses, although they often get updates, this is the exception, not the rule, another main reason is that people aren't used to buying books, we tend to think that we should buy one book and its content is life long, that's not necessarily true.

The second point about they are hard to transport, that could be true but it's not a big deal, in my opinion, you can carry next to your laptop but unlike this, no thief will try to steal it from you 😅. As an alternative, you can carry plenty of books on your mobile, tablet, or Kindle device, and also you can carry the audiobook version if it's possible and convenient, I can't imagine listening to the "Clean code" book, but of course the "Soft skills" yes.

Actually, the third and fourth points are not problems of the book itself but you. Make reading a habit will result in developing great skills such as constancy, imagination, orthography, vocabulary and of course, knowledge, think about it, it worths the effort, in the end, reading goes from being a chore to be a pleasure, and in the meanwhile, you learn, that's what I call a win-win situation.

Some of the books could be expensive, but something that really helps me in that is to buy them on Internet, watch the reviews and opinions on Amazon is also very important. I am on this trip to make reading a habit and is amazing how it helps you, that's why I recommend it to you as well. It completely worths every dollar and minute of reading expended.

Without more delays, here goes my top 5 books list for programmers, most of them are in English, a mandatory language in this field:

• "The Black Book of the Programmer" from Rafael Gomez Blanes (Good job Rafael!, I read the Spanish version)
• "Soft Skills: The software developer's life manual" from John Sonmez
• "The Complete Software Developer's Career Guide" from John Sonmez
• "The Pragmatic Programmer" from Andy Hunt y Dave Thomas
• "Clean code" from Robert Martin (uncle Bob).

I would recommend you to read in that order, the last one is more technical. In the next blog posts, I'll make an analysis of each one, but now the ball is on your side, start googling them and reading, do it on a daily basis with short goals, it's a hack.

"If you are thinking about it, decide it.

If you already decided, dont think about it anymore"

Japanese popular wisdom

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