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Summary: Comprehensive and approachable path to becoming an expert
Review: Provides a lot of what experienced developers would consider "commonsense" advice and philosophies. Also gives an excellent language for talking about this sort of stuff with others.Short and to the point. It's sometimes hard to get "I'm too busy" developers to read, especially the big, dense books lots of folks like to produce around the programmer management area. It's easy to find sections in this book that are useful, can be thrown at someone and be consumed by them in a half-hour (not fully digested, though!). Absolutely wonderful. What can I say? It's hard to find fault with this book. The only thing I can say that might have helped are a few stories about the risks of not following the practices, though it's questionable how much that would help things. If programmers were horses, you could lead them to water, but not until they'd suffered severe dehydration and a hospital trip or two would they convince themselves that advice you'd given around appropriate water consumption was actually useful...
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Summary: A helpful book...
Review: That is very helpful guide.
Easy reading, easy understanding. I recommend this book for anyone who do programming.
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Summary: How to be a real programmer and engineer
Review: If you actually like programming. If you don't think programming by horde is a good idea. Or if you aren't looking at it as a stepping one to management. Then you need to read this book. It will make you think about your profession in a whole new light, as a skill and a discipline. After the wave of horde programming J2EE nightmares has passed and there is still real work to be done by programmers it is people who look at programming as a life-long skill who will be left to build the interesting stuff. Get involved. Get on-board. Enjoy programming. Read this book.
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Summary: Highly overrated
Review: This book includes a lot of obvious advice (like keep your designs simple --- the KISS principle), and is lacking in any profound insights about how to make it so. The material on Design by Contract elevates a marginally useful idea to a major breakthrough, which it is not. One wonders whether the authors have much field experience writing large systems.
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Summary: Perfect book
Review: I've just finished the book. I love it very much!
The book is full of golden sayings from the beginning to the end. Some of the principles are just in my mind, but I've never summarized them, when I found them in the book, I was very excited. Most of the tips are very short, it is impossible for the writers give more information about the tip, perhaps we can't get much "knowledge" itself from the book, but we can learn the way to get "knowledge" from the book. We Chinese have a proverb: It is better to teach a person fishing than give him (her) fish. Well, this book¡¯s writers teach us how to "fish"!
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Summary: excellent
Review: This is an excellent book containing many points that every programming should be noting in one way or another. In some cases, it's perhaps stating the obvious or what you think may be the obvious but I was surprised how I found myself very guilty of not bothering with such simple things. I think every programmer should read this book, and even a simple program of trying to adopt or take on the occassional pragmatic practice every few weeks would be a great thing for us all to do! I'd like to make sure every programmer I work with has read this book.
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Summary: Your guide to practical, successful software development
Review: I think the other reviews say it all. This book is a perfect mix of information and practical advice for software developers at any level.
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Summary: Definitely a must read for anyone in the industry
Review: This book was recommended by a co-worker, and he mentioned that at a previous gig, his manager got a copy for everyone in the department. This is not a reference book, but it is technical in nature. As such, it is meant for programmers and those who work closely with them (analysts, QA engineers, and project managers could benefit from it as well), but it isn't dry or boring in the least. It contains quite an assortment of gems gleaned from the wisdom of very experienced coders. Although you won't find anything earth shattering, you will find a collection of concrete examples that you can use to immediately improve your skills. These are not the latest methodology fads (i.e., UML, OOP), but rather things to think about while you are writing code. As an example, have you ever gotten a program to work, and although you're not exactly sure how, you figure you better leave well enough alone, lest you break it again? This is "Programming By Coincidence," Tip 31, page 172. I would strongly recommend this to newer programmers, especially. If you look at the talented coders in your organization, chances are they are practicing a lot of the ideas in this book (and most likely they own a copy).
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Summary: The preface is good
Review: I bought the book after reading the preface, only to find that all the good stuff is in the preface and the first chapter. Everything after that, you could find in any introductory computing text, but it's presented here as though the authors discovered it themselves five minutes ago. The resulting tone is a little too pedantic, and the material is really nothing new.
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Summary: practical insight for all programmers
Review: This book takes the reader through all facets of software development and gives practical methodologies to write better software. This book is not language specific; almost all of the concepts can be applied to virtually any language. Besides dealing with how to write better code, "The Pragmatic Programmer" discusses project management, team dynamics, user expectations, and a host of other topics. At only 250 pages, this book does not go in to great detail in any one topic, yet there is enough information for anyone to implement the practices suggested in the book. I recommend this book to anyone who is in the field of software development: developers, project managers, systems analysis, and even managers who want a better understanding of how the software development process should be.
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