Programming audiobook recommendations?

acannan@programming.dev to Programming@programming.dev – 33 points –

Hi everyone,

I've got quite a long drive coming up and was interested in finding some audiobooks, which got me thinking, has anyone listened to (also, do they exist) any programming-centric audiobooks recently?

I figure podcasts might be the more popular format for technical content, but I'd be more interested in an audiobook if people know of any good ones.

I'm primarily a python developer if that helps narrow it down. Interested in LLMs, python core stuff, message brokers, databases, whatever!

Let me know if you have any leads!

6

If you work in a team environment, I recommend these two books: The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project.

Not strictly about programming, but focuses on software projects and devops. The fast-paced novels will make your drive go much faster.

I read The Phoenix Project recently, and had a PTSD episode from all of the hallmarks of dysfunction that I’ve experienced in my career. Good book, but probably needs a trigger warning.

I recently re-read the book and had a similarly traumatic episode from all the managers over my career that read the book and somehow took the wrong lessons from the dysfunction portrayed.

I think you’ll have better luck with podcasts. Technical books tend to have long tracts of code that would be excruciating to listen to.

You might enjoy:

  • co-recursive
  • software unscripted
  • this developer’s life

I don't know of many recorded audio books, but you could also use a Text to Speech engine to listen to any technical blogs or articles. I use Android apps like Pocket or T2S to queue up a backlog of TODO read items, then when I'm out for a long walk, I can just press play and let the TTS do it's thing. Of course, I curate this list for longer pure text reads, devoid of code snippets, equations, or visual graphics that TTS would have a tough time conveying over audio.

Looks like I may need to find a successor to pocket. They do a great job scraping connect via readable mode, but I'd like to find a shelf hosted or mobile+offline app equivalent for queuing up web articles, just in case pocket gets cut from further development by Mozilla management.

Pragmatic Programmer is OK, there's not any code that I can remember and it's just general purpose, helpful ideas for programmers to follow