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Books are of the most popular products mentioned on Reddit. Often the best and most popular are cited multiple times. One may wonder what the most cited books are (I did!). Luckily, Reddit hosts all their data publicly so it’s fairly easy to find out.

Methodology: To determine the number of citations a book had, I counted the number of amazon links that pointed to a book. This makes the task far easier since extracting books from text is hard and entity resolution on slight differentiations of spellings would also be difficult. Counting amazon links is only a proxy.

I give you the 5 most cited books on Reddit since 2015.

#1 Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

Coming in on top is a book I’ve read myself, Clean Code. Personally, I can attest to its fantastic quality and is a must read for software engineers.

Here’s what one user said about it:

Clean Code is NOT specific to C#. However, it gives you a holistic understanding of how to write code that is readable and effective. This is how I was able to transition from writing code that simply functioned (primarily for school) to code that my coworkers could pick up and run with. The book is the bible of software style where I work.

#2 How to Win Friends & Influence People

Another classic book, How to Win Friends & Influence People, ranks just 1 mention below Clean Code. This book provides useful lessons for everyone, but as an introvert and someone who thought social interaction was difficult, this book was eye opening.

On /r/socialskills, one user writes an extremely thoughful response on how to not feel socially inept. One of the books s/he recommends is How to Win Friends.

#3 Introduction to Algorithms, 3rd Edition

It seems tech people recommend a lot of books. This one appears often in /r/learnprogramming, and after reading the comments, many people, well, recommend it as a good book when learning programming.

#4 The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

I’ve never seen or heard of this book, so it was exciting to discover this one. This comment sums it up well:

Best cookbook you can get with everything youre looking for. The guy was a chemist I believe and decided to combine it with his love of cooking. It tells you why cooking an egg a certain way will give a certain result. What happens to the proteins inside the egg, what cookware to use, how to improve already popular dishes. Great shit in store for you my friend.

#5 No More Mr Nice Guy: A Proven Plan for Getting What You Want in Love, Sex, and Life

The 5th and final one is a book that has found itself sincerely recommended by many commenters. The description on Amazon says:

No More Mr. Nice Guy! landed its author, a certified marriage and family therapist, on The O’Reilly Factor and the Rush Limbaugh radio show.

Make of it what you will!

Runner ups

Dungeons and Dragons books actually were mentioned more than any other book on Reddit, however, after reviewing it, I decided that a DnD Starter Kit is closer to a game than a book, so I disqualified those.

Here are the next runner ups:

Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing

Interested in browsing more things like these on Reddit? Check out ThingsOnReddit.