Sunday 21 June 2015

Book Review - The Pragmatic Programmer

Well. It's been a while since my last blog but this book was too good not to shout to the world about. If you're a software developer and you're looking for ways to become better then it's a must read. It's that simple.

The Pragmatic Programmer is essentially a collection of tips which, when followed, will help you to hone your skills. It's suitable for all experience levels from the novice writing code for fun to the senior developer who has been writing code for the past 30 years. It's got something for everyone.

Interestingly, a lot of the tips discussed in the book you would have likely come across at University or in your day to day job. However, the authors have expanded on those basic concepts and applied them across the board to every facet of your day job with some pretty awesome consequences for efficiency, productivity and code maintainability.

You'll find yourself thinking about previous projects and wishing you had applied some of the tips discussed You'll silently vow to yourself to apply some of the concepts the next time you sit down at the keyboard and start writing code.

My only negative about the book is that there are a lot of tips,70 in total. As developers, our primary aim is to ship code and it's our job to do that in a timely manner, balancing time, quality and maintainability. If you attempt to do everything the book recommends then you'll soon find yourself missing deadlines... a lot of them. (Although you would have a very well designed, well documented, bug-less system... it'll just be ready about 10 years too late.)

Implementing each and every idea on every project is a practical impossibility but if you are able to implement the odd tip here and there, which could reduce the effort of documentation or designing a module to better promote maintainability, then the book would have accomplished its goals - to help you reach the next level.

Enjoy!