The Pragmatic Craftsman :: Simplicity from complexity : by Stanley Kubasek ::

Effective Programming: More Than Writing Code
by Jeff Atwood
ISBN B008HUMTO0
Date Read 9/2012

My Rating

I’ve been following The Coding Horror blog for at least a few years. When I heard that the author released a book, via a blog post on the blog, , I felt both excited and unexcited. Excited because I like author. Unexcited because I discovered that it’s mostly reprints from the blog. However, the price of $2.99 for the book pulled me in. And I’m glad it did.

You might have read a few posts from the blog, but most likely not all. When put together as a book, I was inclined to read it from cover to cover. My success rate on reading blog posts, especially longer ones, is low. So most of the material was new to me.

Excellent topics! Let’s take an overview of the sections:

• The Art of Geting Shit Done;
• Principles of Good Programming;
• Hiring Programmers the Right Way;
• Getting Your Team to Work Together;
• Your Betcave: Effective Workspaces for Programmers;
• Designing with the User in Mind;
• Security Basics: Protecting Your Users’ Data;
• Testing Your Code;
• Building Managing and Benefiting from a Community;
• Marketing Weasels and How Not to Be One;
• Keeping Your Priorities Straight

Those are sections and they each contain a few chapters.

Easy to read. And fun! Most of the chapters are short. I love books like that. I can easily read one or two chapters on a train. This was a perfect book for that. The author can write. Sometimes he made me laugh. But I really enjoyed the easy to read, conversational style.

Filled with lots of tips. I’m not a newbie to programming, but I’ve learned a few things: few things about chairs, lighting, application pricing, ui, code reviews, testing, and lots more. Along the way, I kept saying to myself: I couldn’t say it better; I can’t agree more. Nothing really ground braking, but still…

Not all chapters were interesting. A few I decided to skip after reading a few paragraphs. But there were only a few, I think two or three.

A great book to pick up and read casually. You will enjoy it. I can almost guarantee that you will learn something new and find a few facts fascinating. And if you think books are too expensive, then is $2.99 too much? Now I get the chapter on pricing!