Book Review: The Pragmatic Programmer

Wow. Stop reading this review and go buy this book immediately. It is that good. There are many many reviews of this book out there, so I’m going to be brief. Page for page, this book has had the most impact on my view of programming out of any programming material I’ve ever read.

The book covers a philosophy instead of tools, and that makes it an almost timeless piece. While they do at times point to particular technologies, they do not focus on those technologies and leave the references to a minimum so that the reader is free to apply the philosophy to their particular technology.

The book covers topics such as orthogonality, the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle, unit testing, automation, refactoring, and tools. I will probably make some posts that deal with the topics individually, so for now I’m only going to talk about some of the more impactful sections for me.

The first thing that really hit me was in Chapter 3, The Basic Tools. I’ve always just used the tools available to me on a particular platform that was easiest to learn. This gave me a small learning curve, but left out a lot of functionality. One of their first recommendations is to find a powerful text editor and learn it well. I looked at the options that are cross platform and went with vim. I’ll say it again here… WOW! My productivity went through the roof and I’ve now found plugins for firefox (vimperator) and Visual Studio (ViEmu) to mimic the base vi functionality in those environments. With a powerful text editor, I spend more time on the keyboard, making fewer keystrokes, to accomplish more than I ever thought possible.

The second section that really impacted me was at the end of the book talking about working as a Pragmatic Team. I’ve had some bad experiences with teams and this section spoke directly on how to mitigate the problems I had run into. This should be required reading for any project with more than a single developer.

All in all, the whole book is a gold mine of good advice and leads to other good information. It is a rather small book given the topics it covers, but the content is so well thought out and organized, I think it is just right.