Customer Reviews

Roundtable on Technical Leadership: A SHAPE Forum Dialogue

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The first line of the book puts forth a wonderful and accurate tone for the text. "The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity." There are two main threads in the book, stupid programming tricks and strategies for effective teaching. By their definition, a stupid programming trick is a design tactic that appears to be a stroke of genius when first used and then after circumstances evolve, turns out to have been negative, sometimes even a disaster. Effective teaching is more an art than a science, and the second section deals with some of the mindset fundamentals necessary to do it well.
The material was gleaned from an invitation-only web discussion group called SHAPE. In the introduction, 38 contributors are listed, and they provide the reservoir of wisdom necessary for the winnowing and pruning of the best ideas. The advice in the book is some of the best that I have ever read. There is none of the egotistical posturing that pervades so many of the online forums, the contributors are genuinely humble and realistic. I found them refreshing, entertaining and likable.
The chapter titles are descriptive content headers and they are as follows:

1) Tricks That Ignore Those Who Come After.
2) Tricks That Destroy Portability.
3) Stupid Design Tricks.
4) Stupid Design Document Tricks.
5) Tricks Arising From Social Inadequacy.
6) Experts And Gurus As Leaders.
7) The Leader As Learner.
8) The Expert As Teacher.
9) The Courage To Teach In Any Direction.
10) The Courage To Be Yourself.

So many technical books contain quality information, but the style of presentation is dense to the point of mind lock or something like a pot of dishwater containing gold nuggets. The good stuff is present, you just have to dig around to find it. This book is neither, the lightness of the prose and the candor of the participants makes it entertaining, and the quality of the advice makes it valuable. When designing software, we all step in it from time to time, and if you read this book you can reduce the frequency of that happening to you.

The other comment has already sang praises for the book, and I ditto it and will not repeat it.

Content:
If you've been doing programming for a few years, the book topics would be no stranger to you. It's a forum-based book recording on discussions among a group of experts, and their points are mostly valid.

Format:
However, I feel that the forum-type of books do not suit programming very well, as a programmer you would be looking for clear, executable guides, instead of vague advices given by several different people.

Limitations:
And the technical leadership does not stop with writing good code and communicating with your programmer peers and your programmer subordinates. Other very important aspects such as business requirements and technical innovations are not addressed in the book.

Applicability:
Also the examples the book refers to are mostly from the past several decades. As the industry changes so fast the examples won't ring a bell to programmers today.

Value:
Lastly a lot of programming jobs have been outsourced, and good programming skills don't change this fact.