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!

Book Review - Secrets of a JavaScript Ninja

I was watching a talk given by Angelina Fabbro on YouTube named "JavaScript masterclass". Its all about trying to become an expert in a particular field. It's a great talk and I suggest you give it a watch. In that talk, she mentions a book, "Secrets of a JavaScript Ninja" and being what I'd consider as an intermediate JavaScript developer myself, I thought it deserved a look. 

Just to give you an idea of the level of my JavaScript expertise, I've never been "taught" JavaScript, I've never attended any courses, I didn't cover it at University. My general method has been to look up pieces of code online as and when I've needed it. After doing this for a while you get a general feel of the language and after 10 odd years (on and off), I feel that I'm pretty knowledgeable in the area however, due to this learning methodology, undoubtedly there's going to be gaps in my knowledge and so I bought this book in hope to fill those gaps.

I'm very happy to report that it does fill in those gaps and more! It does so in a clear and concise way. Any new concept is backed up with code that's been written in such a way that its easy to follow and if there is a difficult concept, virtually all of the code has been broken down into small snippets so you can quickly stick it into JSFiddle and have a play around.

The book covers the core JavaScript language from topics ranging from the importance of functions (and they're far more powerful than I ever imagined) to regular expressions, runtime code evaluation and with statements. These are all areas that you can get by with not knowing in detail but when you do, you'll realize there are far simpler ways of doing the things you've been doing for the past 10 years. As frustrating that is, it is enlightening.

It also covers some of the problematic areas of programming in the browser and the cross browser problems that come hand in hand with this. From event handling, manipulating the DOM and CSS selectors, it covers them all and offers some inventive solutions to problems that you've probably come across yourself.

The really good thing about the book is that throughout it introduces you to patterns of programming JavaScript that you probably don't already use and really wish you did. If you're anything like me you'll find yourself thinking "I wish I had programmed x like this" or "I wish I knew about this feature before I programmed x, y, z".

The book is co-authored by John Resig, the creator of the most popular JavaScript library, jQuery and the book often uses methodologies and solutions that are used within that library. That to me, really gives this book substance, you're learning methods that are out there in the real world and that work so well that it's led to the immense popularity of jQuery.

If you're an intermediate JavaScript developer like me then this book is a must. Some of it you'll already know but some of it you won't and having that extra knowledge at your disposal will give you the tools to write far more elegant code.

If you're new to JavaScript development then I'd suggest holding off on this book for now. The book assumes a certain amount of knowledge regarding the language. You probably could work your way through the book and pick it up as you go along but it will take you a significant amount of time (ok, you'll be learning a good portion of a language so that's to be expected) but I think that process would take away something from the book so if you are in this category, I'd suggest going away, learning the basics and then picking this book up in a month or two's time.