Episode · The Pragmatic Engineer · 2025-11-19
Gergely Orosz & Martin Fowler: books mentioned on The Pragmatic Engineer
How AI will change software engineering – with Martin Fowler
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Gergely Orosz discussed Refactoring by Martin Fowler and others and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler. Martin Fowler recommended Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro, and The years of Lyndon Johnson (Volumes 1-3) by Robert A. Caro, and discussed Patterns of Distributed Systems by Unmesh Joshi.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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Refactoring
Refactoring by Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, John Brant, William Opdyke, and Don Roberts is a foundational software engineering text that explores how to improve the design of existing code and make maintainability more manageable.
Discussed“So speaking about refactoring, LM are very good at refactoring and and you you've written the book back in 1999 called Refactoring. This is now the second edition which 20 years later it's it's been refreshed.”
Where to get it
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Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler is an influential software development manual cataloging tested design strategies for large-scale business systems.
Discussed“You wrote the book patterns of enterprise application architecture in 2002 and this was a collection of more than 40 patterns uh things like lazy load identity map template view and many others.”
Where to get it
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Patterns of Distributed Systems
Discussed“I worked very recently with Unmesh on his book on dist patterns in distributed systems and I felt that was a very good way of coming up with again a language to describe how we think about the core elements”
Where to get it
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Thinking, Fast and Slow
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman is a landmark exploration of behavioral psychology that examines the two systems of thought that drive human judgment and decision-making.
Recommended“So, a book I I do particularly like to recommend is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kaneman. I like it because um he does a really good job of trying to give you an intuition about numbers”
Where to get it
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The Power Broker
The Power Broker by Robert A.
Recommended“Another book that I'd mention that is completely separate and is in challenging in a completely different way that I've been totally obsessed with is a book called The Power Broker.”
Where to get it
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The years of Lyndon Johnson (Volumes 1-3)
The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A.
Recommended“And then once you go on from that, you move on to his second biography because he's only written two biographies and that's his currently five volume biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, LBJ, which is equally brilliant”
Where to get it
Other mentions in this episode (3) — ad reads, self-promotion and passing references, never counted
“He is one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto in 2001, the author of the popular book Refactoring, and regularly publishes articles on software engineering on his blog.”
“But Kent was at the time his energy was to write the first extreme programming book, the white book. He didn't have the energy to write a refactoring book. So I thought, well, I'm going to do it then.”
“there was your book about enterprise uh architecture patterns there was also the gang of four book there was a lot of talk when I was interviewing around that time on interviews they were asking me questions about how to do a factory pattern”