Customer Reviews

Solid Code

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Poor value, watered-down treatment of topics, rehash of past material.

John Robbins gives a great foreword however, and the cover design is great with nice chapter quotes.

Visual Studio 2008 Team System is the minimum required software to work with the code.

Where's the beef? "Designing for Scale" was such a promising chapter, but instead offered platitudes and hardly solid advice. "Choose Scalable Application Designs: Design simple application architectures, Design to scale out, Partition data effectively..." And "Design Application Infrastructure to Scale: Load balance hardware..."

Disappointing title, as Writing Solid Code from 1993 was such a great (and aptly titled) book.

Better books IMHO:

* Code Complete 2 by Steve McConnell

* Rapid Development by Steve McConnell

* Secure Coding by Mark C. Graff and Kenneth R. van Wyk

* Writing Solid Code by Steve Maguire (uses only C however)

* Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt, David Thomas

See for yourself, hopefully at your library or bookstore.

This book did a really good job going over the basics of good software design and gave a junior level programmer lots of good ideas to do before they just jump in and write code. Surprisingly, the book even went into detail on some of the third party tools used by developers.

For experienced developers, might I suggest coffee or something to keep you awake for some of the chapters; very dry.

There are many generalities, not very specific details, on the things they tell you to do.

If you already know Viso and some of the other 3rd party tools, you can skip several paragraphs in many of the chapters.

Overall it was a good book that went over the basics of what a good programmer needs to do to help write better code. An experienced programmer might not get too much information from this book because its focus is very broad.

I spent several years building products and services for Microsoft and now manage product development at another company. The authors do a FANTASTIC job distilling the best practices of one of the top engineering companies on the planet. Well-written and very applicable to the development of any commercial-strength software product or service, big or small. I've bought several copies for my organization and made it mandatory reading.

It is a very interesting book if you are developer or manager. It gives a good overview of the whole coding process and most important of it: it is not boring!

You can read all chapters in a row, like I did, or pick up the ones that might interest you at a particular time.

A good reference and acquisition, defenitely.

Anyone serious about writing performant, secure, and scalable code should read this book. Very well written and organized with appropriate emphasis on processes, planning, and prep to prevent letting "implementation drive design." As an industry veteran I've seen this happen way too many times. Kudos to the authors for stressing these important factors of great software design. Highly recommended.

This book is so helpful and insightful! I am a newbie to the industry and this really helped me understand the process. If you're new in a job, looking to brush up skills or even if you think you know it all - read this book and learn some more.