The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master eBook: Andrew Hunt, David Thomas: Amazon.de: Kindle-Shop

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Programmers are craftspeople. They are trained to use a certain set of tools(editors, object mangers, version trackers) to generate a certain kind of product (programs) that will operate in some environment (operating systems on hardware assemblies). Like any other craft, computer programming has spawned a body of wisdom, most of which isn't taught at universities or in certification classes. Rather, most programmers arrive at the so-called tricks of the trade over time, by independent experimentation. In ThePragmatic Programmer, Andrew Hunt and David Thomas codify many of the truths they've discovered during their respective careers as designers of software and writers of code.

Some of the authors' nuggets of pragmatism are concrete, and the path to their implementation is clear. They advise readers to learn one text editor, for example, and use it for everything. They recommend the use of version-tracking software for even the smallest projects, and promote the merits of learning regular expression syntax and a text-manipulation language. Other (perhaps more valuable) advice is softer. The authors note in their section on debugging, "if you see hoof prints think horses, notzebras". That is, suspect everything, but start looking for problems in the most obvious places. They offer some advice on making estimates of time and expense, and on integrating testing into the development process. You'll want a copy of The Pragmatic Programmer for two reasons: It displays your own accumulated wisdom more cleanly than you ever bothered to state it and it introduces you to methods of work that you may not yet have considered. Working programmers will enjoy this book.

Topics covered: A workmanlike approach to software design and construction that allows for efficient, profitable development of high-quality products. Elements of the approach include specification development, customer relations, team management, design practices, development tools, and testing procedures. The authors present their approach with the help of anecdotes and technical problems. --DavidWall, amazon.com

Amazon.com

Programmers are craftspeople trained to use a certain set of tools (editors, object managers, version trackers) to generate a certain kind of product (programs) that will operate in some environment (operating systems on hardware assemblies). Like any other craft, computer programming has spawned a body of wisdom, most of which isn't taught at universities or in certification classes. Most programmers arrive at the so-called tricks of the trade over time, through independent experimentation. In The Pragmatic Programmer, Andrew Hunt and David Thomas codify many of the truths they've discovered during their respective careers as designers of software and writers of code.

Some of the authors' nuggets of pragmatism are concrete, and the path to their implementation is clear. They advise readers to learn one text editor, for example, and use it for everything. They also recommend the use of version-tracking software for even the smallest projects, and promote the merits of learning regular expression syntax and a text-manipulation language. Other (perhaps more valuable) advice is more light-hearted. In the debugging section, it is noted that, "if you see hoof prints think horses, not zebras." That is, suspect everything, but start looking for problems in the most obvious places. There are recommendations for making estimates of time and expense, and for integrating testing into the development process. You'll want a copy of The Pragmatic Programmer for two reasons: it displays your own accumulated wisdom more cleanly than you ever bothered to state it, and it introduces you to methods of work that you may not yet have considered. Working programmers will enjoy this book. --David Wall

Topics covered: A useful approach to software design and construction that allows for efficient, profitable development of high-quality products. Elements of the approach include specification development, customer relations, team management, design practices, development tools, and testing procedures. This approach is presented with the help of anecdotes and technical problems.

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Disappointing: Shallow and Old School 7. November 2005

Von J. Benjamin St John

Format:Taschenbuch

As most other reviewers, I was drawn in by the glowing commentaries here on Amazon.

As background, I've been programming professionally for nine years now, on a variety of projects, but generally high-performance embedded stuff. I'm interested in improving my software development & management skills, and have read a number of other, better books (listed later) about these topics.

My first criticism is that the collection of 50-odd tips are simply too shallowly presented to be very interesting. Generally, if you agree, you say, "yeah, duh," and if you don't, there's no discussion of the point, and no attempt to address known difficulties with "good" practices. There also seemed to be no attempt to balance some of the points. For example, the authors repeatedly talk about writing your code so it's flexible. In general, a good idea. On the other hand, they really seem to think you should be writing everything, regardless of what sort of application it is, to run on different machines, under different operating systems, with and without concurrency, etc. This, to me, just seems foolish, extra work, extra code, extra bugs. The estimates I've seen (in other, better, books) say that just writing re-usable code takes three times more work than "normal" code, ignoring multi-platform complexities.

The old school comment (and I consider myself fairly old school) is there because they very obviously come from a Unix/command line environment. I will admit, they motivated me to improve my scripting skills, something I've been planning on doing for a while. But then they have inane advice, like "use only one editor *for everything*". This is perhaps nice, if you can, but on larger projects or organizations, this probably isn't possible. I use the IDE required by the project, a different editor for documentation (also required) and a third one for doing hex & advanced search and replace. Perhaps with emacs and 47 scripts this wouldn't be necessary, but I'm not convinced it would be efficient either.

All in all, the advice is generally good, but I think there are better books out there (e.g. Code Complete, Writing Solid Code, Rapid Development, The Mythical Man-Month, C++ Coding Standards). As a light book to get you thinking about your craft, it's not bad, but that's the best I can say about it.

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Are you programming or hacking? 3. Juni 2000

Von Steve Hayes

...and what's the difference? I've often felt that the difference was attitude. Programmers (or "professionals" if you prefer) were continually thinking about what they did, why they did it and how they could do it better. And I don't just mean searching for a new language ("maybe I should learn Java this week?").The rest of us are just tooling around doing the best we can and wondering why it sometimes doesn't work.

"The Pragmatic Programmer" is clearly written by and for professional programmers. Reading it with attention will force you to think deeply about the way you develop software. If your first response is "but this isn't pragmatic" or "I don't have time to do these things" then I encourage you to think again. Perhaps the barrier is change itself. Sure, applying the practices in this book may slow you down in the short term (you always go slower when you're learning a new skill) but the benefits to establishing these practices as habits are enormous.

We are working through this book as part of a weekly study group at our office. This seems to be a great way to investigate things you're uncomfortable. And I don't agree with every practice in this book, but please think about them as deeply as you can before you reject them!

Whenever I interview someone I ask them what book has most influenced the way they develop software. If they answer "The Pragmatic Programmer" (or "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance") then they have the job!

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The wisest book about programming I have read 23. Juli 2000

Von Peter Marklund

I think almost any programmer can benefit from reading this book. The book is extremely well written and inspiring. Readers of Kent Beck and Martin Fowler will recognize much of their philosophy (see xprogramming.com). Much of the wisdom in the book is condensed into a set of rules listed at the end which makes a very good summary. So even if you have only 20 minutes you will probably walk away inspired and with new insights. What distinguishes this book from other books about programming that I have read (like the Refactoring book by Martin Fowler) is that this book generalizes principles about coding in a very convincing way (many of the principles could probably be helpful for any engineer, not only programmers). Take for example the well known principle of not duplicating code. The authors generalize this principle and say that information should never be duplicated. This means for example that you should write documentation, but the documentation should not duplicate information that is easy to extract from the code (the documentation could for example present the purpose of code and give an overview). Check out the book for many other equally interesting principles!