Secrets of the Rock Star Programmers: Riding the IT Crest [Paperback]

Ed Burns (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 21, 2008 | ISBN-10: 0071490833 | ISBN-13: 978-0071490832 | Edition: 1

A-list Programmers Reveal How to Develop Breakout Skills

Find out what it takes to push your programming chops to the next level and design killer software by getting inside the minds of today's rock star programmers:

• Rod Johnson, Inventor of the Spring Framework
• Adrian Colyer, Pioneer of Aspect Oriented Programming Tools, Project Lead of AspectJ
• Java Posse--Tor Norbye, Joe Nuxoll, Carl Quinn, and Dick Wall
• Chris Wilson, Lead Architect of Microsoft Internet Explorer
• Nikhil Kothari, Architect of ASP.NET AJAX
• Hani Suleiman, Author of "The Bile Blog"
• James Gosling, Father of Java
• Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Creator of the Hudson Continuous Integration Tool
• Herb Schildt, The World's Bestselling Programming Author
• Floyd Marinescu, Co-founder of ServerSide.com; Founder and Lead Editor of InfoQ.com
• Andy Hunt, Co-founder of the Pragmatic Programmers
• Dave Thomas, Object Oriented Software Pioneer
• Max Levchin, Co-founder and Former CTO of PayPal
• Libor Michalek, Co-founder of Slide.com
• Weird Al Yankovic, The Programmer's Rock Star

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ed Burns is a senior software engineer at Sun Microsystems and a well-known personality in the enterprise IT profession. He is the author of McGraw-Hill's JavaServer Faces:The Complete Reference.

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media; 1 edition (February 21, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0071490833
• ISBN-13: 978-0071490832
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,162,105 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ed Burns is currently a Senior Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems, Inc. At Sun, Ed is the specification co-lead for JavaServer Faces, the standard Web Application Framework for Java EE. In this role, Ed leads a team of web experts from across the industry in developing JavaServer Faces Technology through the Java Community Process and in open source. His areas of professional interests include web application frameworks, AJAX, reducing complexity, test driven development, requirements gathering, and computer supported collaborative work. Before working on JavaServer Faces, Ed worked on a wide variety of client and server side web technologies since 1994, including NCSA Mosaic, Mozilla, the Sun Java Plugin, Jakarta Tomcat, the Cosmo Create HTML authoring tool, and the web transport layer in the Irix operating system from Silicon Graphics.

Ed has a Bachelor of Computer Science degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While at UIUC, Ed took a minor in Germanic Studies and worked for IBM in the co-op program, where he first acquired a fondness for computer history by working on System 370 Office Software.

Ed is a frequent speaker at international industry conferences, having presented many times at Sun's JavaOneSM conference, given keynote addresses at the W-JAX conference in Munich, Germany and the Globalcode Developer's Conference in São Paulo, Brazil, and the JSFDays conference in Vienna Austria. In addition to keynotes, Ed has given technical sessions atnumerous international Java conferences including Javapolis, Jazoon, JAX-India, TheServerSide.com Java Symposium, No Fluff Just Stuff, the Ajax Experience JAOO, and others, and also has spoken at many Java User Group meetings. A complete list of Ed's conference speaking experience is available at http://purl.oclc.org/NET/edburns/speaking-engagements/ Further information and blogs may be found at http://purl.oclc.org/NET/edburns/.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars OK light reading if you're interested in IT personalities, March 4, 2008

By 

calvinnme - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (TOP 50 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Secrets of the Rock Star Programmers: Riding the IT Crest (Paperback)

This book doesn't have any code tricks. It is just a series of interviews with people who have been instrumental in the software and IT industry over the past twenty years with an emphasis on more recent contributors. It mainly goes over how they look at problems and how they solve problems, with a good mix between their approaches to hard and soft skills. If you are a student doing a paper on the history of computing I'd say it would probably give you a pretty good look at some of the personalities involved in computing on which it is difficult to find much written. For example, James Gosling is the father of the Java language, but it is difficult to find any information on his approach to technical problems and his personality in general. This book gives you that kind of insight on Gosling and on other specific personalities that are leaders in the IT field. The final chapter on Weird Al Yankovic is rather strange, since he has nothing to do with the IT field and his intro has his qualifications listed as "The Programmer's Rock Star". I'm not sure how true that is, but it is an amusing chapter.

It's not for everyone, but it is a rare source for this kind of information.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Superficial chats with enterprise programmers, April 17, 2010

By 

Trevor Burnham (Cambridge, MA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Secrets of the Rock Star Programmers: Riding the IT Crest (Paperback)

There are, roughly speaking, three worlds of programmers: the enterprise world, the startup world, and the academic world. As its ridiculous subtitle suggests, these interviews are with stars of the enterprise world, where Java and heavyweight IDEs dominate. If you don't use Spring and Eclipse, then most of the chapters will feel irrelevant to you. Personally, I'm a refugee from the Java world moving toward Ruby and Python (the languages that reign supreme in the startup world). The most pertinent interviews were with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, the founders of The Pragmatic Progammers. They do fine work; I'd much rather read just about any of their books than this one.

The overproduced design of this book is consistently annoying. Each interview is prefaced by a "Fact Sheet" about the rockstar programmer, with a baseball card-style breakdown of factoids. "Number of kids: Four." Uh, OK. Then the author places interjections throughout the chapter [and not just explanations on square brackets, though there are many of those] but also sidebars like: "Character attribute: Pragmatic, not excessive, optimizer." Ooookay. Why are you interrupting this interview to tell me that? It's as if the author expects me to go build a fantasy baseball team with these programmers. Then the book concludes with a totally superfluous interview with Weird Al Yankovic. Like the rest of the book, that interview doesn't know who its audience is: If you've never heard of Weird Al, it won't make you want to listen to him; and if you're already a fan, you won't learn anything new from it.

But the real problem with this book is the lack of depth. Interviewing programmers in depth without getting mired in too much technical trivia is a big challenge. Masterminds of Programming makes the opposite mistake, producing interviews that are tediously low-level. The one book of interviews with programmers that I'd recommend is Peter Seibel's outstanding Coders at Work. If you really want to know how smart programmers go about solving hard problems, that's the book to read.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars great read, June 8, 2008

By 

Steve McManus (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Secrets of the Rock Star Programmers: Riding the IT Crest (Paperback)

I found this book a great read for a variety of reasons. I don't have an IT background but I enjoy reading about groundbreakers and top performers in any field -- hence my interest in the book. The author does a great job of getting at why these folks are RockStars and how they all think about programming and software. But it also does a great job of getting at the issues they face that we all share -- how do I keep up with the deluge of information in my field, how do I stay current with trends and changes in the industry, how do I maintain a work/life balance, etc? And for those with an IT background, there is some very technical information as well. And with the great interview with Weird Al at the end, there is something here for everyone. You'll find value in this book if you don't know COBOL from Ajax, are in CS 101, or are a 20 year industry veteran.