Just starting out in your coding career? Here's our pick of the top five coding books every aspiring programmer should read in 2019.

1. JavaScript and JQuery: Interactive Front-End Web Development by Jon Duckett 

JavaScript and JQuery introduces core programming concepts using clear descriptions, easy to follow diagrams, handy examples and engaging infographics, making it perfect for visual learners.

Better still, the content assumes no previous programming experience, so it’s ideal for beginners who already know how to create a basic web page but want to learn techniques such as form validation, interactive galleries and tabbed panels.

2. JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford

In JavaScript: The Good Parts, Crockford digs through the “steaming pile of good intentions and blunders” of JavaScript to offer a detailed, yet concise, look at all the genuinely elegant parts, including:

• Syntax
• Objects
• Functions
• Inheritance
• Arrays
• Regular expressions
• Methods
• Style
• Beautiful features

Whether you’re a developer with prior working knowledge of the language or you’re coming to it fresh-faced and curious, this book will introduce you to the powerful and flexible aspects of JavaScript in a way that will leave you wanting more.

3. Professor Frisby’s Guide to Functional Programming by Brian Lonsdorf

As regular readers of our blog will know, we’re big fans of Professor Frisby and his introduction to the functional paradigm. If you’re new to the idea of functional programming, this thorough guide offers a comprehensive introduction and is well worth a read. The material is well presented and offers enough practical examples to allow you to really get to grips with the content and internalise the concepts.

4. You Don’t Know JS: Up & Going by Kyle Simpson

You Don’t Know JS is the first book of a popular JavaScript series that covers everything from core principals to the trickier parts of the language that even experienced programmers avoid.

As the first book in the six-part series, You Don’t Know JS has been written with absolute beginners in mind and offers a fantastic insight into the basic building blocks of programming and JavaScript’s core mechanisms. It also includes a handy overview of the rest of the books in the series, which are all well worth reading once you’ve mastered the essentials.

5. Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin

Want to understand the difference between good and bad code? How to format code for maximum readability? How to put test-driven development into practice?

If you want to learn more about the principals of writing clean code (trust me, you do) then this is the book for you. The author breaks the subject down neatly into three parts and includes plenty of case studies, covering all the questions above, plus many many more. A must for anyone with an interest in producing better, cleaner code.

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