Threads for siIver
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Since no one else has said it, congratulations [:
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Please tell us more about the job. I have a CS degree, but my first job was in pharmaceuticals. We don’t need to know which company, but more context provides better suggestions. Otherwise, this thread just becomes “what are the best books for a CS grad?” which is very similar to other book lists.
The classics like Code Complete, Legacy Code, and The Pragmatic Programmer tend to be good starting points wherever you are going. If you were going to Facebook, Twitter, or the like, I’d recommend Designing Data-Intensive Applications because it covers a range of database and distributed systems topics at good level for you.
If it was a big or more established company, I’d tend to strongly suggest something along the lines of The Rules of Work by Templar. Why? Well, you’ve studied CS and very likely will be exposed to politics, and a range of behaviours that you won’t be familiar with. Good managers would introduce you to these things, but it’s always good to do some of your own reading. Unlike technical books you are don’t take as much direction, it’s more for awareness as you ponder what’s going around you as you focus on being a software engineer. The Harvard Business Review’s guides tend to be small and focused as well, but I’m more familiar with Templar’s books because my manager recommended I read them.
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Given a formal CS background, there probably isn’t a whole lot extra computer science that will be useful to brush up on before starting the job. I would focus on books covering project management, especially case studies. Two pieces of reading I’ve found to be very useful:
That said, I found this reading useful a couple years into my career (not because it was not useful at the beginning, but because I discovered them a couple years in - I have no data on how useful this is at the beginning). I suspect you might find them unrelatable or highly theoretical. I’d recommend coming back to these about a year in, and seeing how the additional experience changes your perspective.
(If you end up reading them, I’d love to hear about your initial impressions! Helping educate better engineers is a topic I’m very interested in, and I’m curious about how we can better build project management skills.)
I will definitely look into these! I found that most of the hard problems that I or my team would encounter during my internships were more organizational rather than technical.