Person
Every book Martin Fowler recommended on podcasts
Key facts
- Martin Fowler has recommended or discussed 4 books on podcasts, as of November 19, 2025.
- Martin Fowler has talked about books on 1 podcast, as of November 19, 2025.
- Those books came up in 1 episode, as of November 19, 2025.
- The 3 books Martin Fowler has mentioned in the most episodes, as of November 19, 2025: The Power Broker, The years of Lyndon Johnson (Volumes 1-3) and Thinking, Fast and Slow.
- The latest episode with a book mention from Martin Fowler aired on November 19, 2025.
Updated
Martin Fowler appeared on The Pragmatic Engineer podcast to discuss artificial intelligence and software engineering. During the conversation, he recommended several notable books across different genres. He highlighted Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, stating that he particularly liked to recommend it because the author does a commendable job of giving readers an intuition about numbers, probability, statistics, and common reasoning errors. Additionally, Fowler discussed Robert A. Caro's The Power Broker, expressing total obsession with its challenging nature, exceptional writing, and detailed account of Robert Moses's exercise of power in New York. As a follow-up to that work, he mentioned Caro's ongoing five-volume biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, praising it as equally brilliant. Fowler also brought up Unmesh Joshi's Patterns of Distributed Systems, noting that he had worked recently with the author and felt the book provided a very good way of establishing a common language and vocabulary to describe core elements and thinking processes surrounding distributed systems architectures.
Books recommended by Martin Fowler
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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
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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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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
Books Martin Fowler wrote
Appearances
| Episode | Podcast | Date | Books |
|---|---|---|---|
| How AI will change software engineering – with Martin Fowler | The Pragmatic Engineer | 2025-11-19 | 4 |
Other mentions (1: passing, ad reads, own books)
“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.”