This sounds like a hallucination tbh. If you look from the other lists, something like Clean Code is hardly recommended and gets criticized quite a bit. It's not something that stands to the test of time.

It's not a bad book, but it's the type of book a good list in 2025 should filter for.

I tend to agree -- it's hard to say without looking at the data more closely but the list is a little outside the scope and intent of my question. It's also possible I could've asked my "ask" more clearly!

I specifically was curious what the best books the people on HN read and was trying to get at the impact of a book on the person more so than just wanting a list of 10 frequently recommended books on programming according to Perplexity's summary of HN. Experimenting with AI is great, but in this case was looking for a more human and individualistic perspective.

I assume the "Perplexity" refers to the LLM that generated the list? As far as I can tell, none of the listed books are hallucinated though.

But I completey agree with your take on Martins Clean Code book.