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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Concise work for productive, common sense development, September 13, 2008
This review is from: The Productive Programmer (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly)) (Paperback)
This is a terrific book for boosting your productivity in two areas: how you work, and how you code.
The first section of the book, Mechanics, focuses on tools you can use to boost your productivity as you're working with your system. Ford launches off into an exploration of lots of little crazy tools that help you automate or ease repetitive tasks. You'll find lots of goodies from virtual desktops to shortcut tips/launchers, to using Ruby to script everything from splitting up SQL to automatically sorting your laundry and washing it for you.[1]
All these little tools and tricks add up to drastic decreases in the amount of friction you're forced to suffer through while doing your daily job. Cutting this friction lets you focus on the job at hand, instead of trying to bend your environment to your will.
The second section of the book, Practice, discusses ways to speed your development. There's an awful lot of goodness in this portion of the book, ranging from re-emphasizing critical aspects of object oriented programming, to object and method composition. Ford walks through a lot of great stories meant to get you to re-evaluate why you do things a certain way. The infamous Angry Monkeys story gets pulled out as an example, and Ford also concisely covers development principles like the Law of Demeter, Occam's Razon, and his Polyglot Programming meme.
The book's concise, amazingly well written, and a definite must-have for your bookshelf.
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20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Mechanics of a Pragmatic Programmers daily work, July 27, 2008
This review is from: The Productive Programmer (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly)) (Paperback)
I've been reading Neal's blog for a while. So I've been looking forward to the book. (I even accidentally ordered it twice - one was the pre-buy at amazon, which I forgot about).
I spend the last two days reading the book and found it quite helpful. There are a lot of concrete tips and examples for immediate use and daily improvement of your mechanic skills. Many of the experiences regarding the effective use of the tools at hand that he describes are well known to me. I can't really understand how developers are not keen to improve their productivity.
Neal's book is a good addition to the PragProgs masterpiece. It concentrates more on the mechanics and on some principles of productive software development. So the triad of values-principles-patterns got a son named mechanics.
What I missed in the book was:
* a comprehensive list of the notes at the end.
* Christopher Alexanders appearance as one of the philosophers.
* the notion of cheat sheets/refcards
* references to Martin Odersky's Scala the scalable language
* references to Kent Becks "Implementation Patterns" (especially in the SLAP section)
As being a developer myself I was a bit disappointed by the quality of the examples (the solutions not the starting points) and a bit by the correctness of the text (typos). I spotted several errors, some bad designs and some uninformed choices even on the first read of the book. I'll post them to the errata page.
Neals suggestion of an online repository of productive programmers tools, tips and mechanics is a great idea. I'd really like to join this effort.
Michael
http://creating.passionate-developers.org
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great book but not without faults, January 10, 2009
This review is from: The Productive Programmer (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly)) (Paperback)
I saw Neal the first time at DLW Europe. I'd like to check out the speakers online before deciding which talks to attend - the results were not positive at all; IT consultant (we've had our share at work) + spending lots of time speaking on conferences, that's a combination not likely to give me warm feelings. I still ended up in attending his talk because of lack of alternatives and thank god I did. Neal isn't only a great speaker but he also had something to say and the necessary experience and war stories to back it up. I ended up by attending every presentation of Neal plus - back at work - giving a presentation of his talks to my fellow co-workers.
Finding out that he now has written a book - I instantly had to read it. And the book is certainly a valuable read that I'll keep around as reference at least for a while. There's lots of great tips about tools, automation, ... that will certainly find their way into my professional life. However, it did not blow me off my feet. I've read "Pragmatic Programmer - From Journeyman to Master" before (a perfect book in my opinion) and this book does not quite measure up to it. The style is not as perfect - the information not as well-presented. However what I miss most is that Neal sometimes present a topic but then does not follow up with "How to get started" - most notably with "Polyglot Programming" and "Test driven design". I know that both topics are maybe out of scope of the book but then at least a reference to another book, website, ... would have been great. So even if I'm all psyched to up try to apply this principles now at my current projects, I know from past experience that adding new languages in any mix more often result in time wasted time because of integration issues... and how to start TDD on a project that's been going on for 15 years without any unit tests is beyond my imagination.
Don't get me wrong - it's a great book and well worth the read; it just needs some polishing to get it to excellent...
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