Book Review: The Productive Programmer

When I heard that Neal Ford was releasing a book on programmer productivity, I anxiously went to Amazon to pre-order it. Problem was that it was almost two years ago and Neal's busy schedule has kept him from finishing it for quite some time. Now that it is finally out and I've read through it (twice actually), I would highly recommend it to anyone doing software development on a daily basis.

I've seen Neal speak at a number of conferences like Codemash, NoFluffJustStuff, and eRubycon, and I've always walked away with something that will improve me as a software developer. The reason is fairly simple, Neal is at his core a developer, and more than many other speakers, he understands the problems and challenges that face developers.

The The Productive Programmer is really two smaller books slammed together.

The first part is focused on tools and techniques that help you work. I actually re-read the book a couple of times because I did a horrible job of keeping track of the utilities and power toys that I wanted to download my first time through. The second time I went through it I started putting post-its on the pages where I wanted to remember a command or download a utility that made sense. The book was littered with post its by the end of it. Neal provides a number of utilities and techniques for both Mac and Windows platforms that will allow you to work more efficiently in your day to day environment. *nix environments are notably absent here, but the command line advice provided for Macs, are obviously equally useful across any *nix distro.

The second part of the book is largely focused on how you build software. A large majority of Neal's talks at conferences carry this common theme. Neal is adept at identifying and explaining principles and patterns of development that yield the best results. Metaprogramming, TDD, Fluent Interfaces, Polyglot programming and many other topics are covered in an easy to digest manner that harkens back to the bible of software development: The Pragmatic Programmer. Neal is able to provide concrete examples throughout the book, based on his vast experience in consulting through the years.

The productive programmer is easy to read, full of valuable information, and applicable to junior developers and seasoned veterans alike. Again, I would highly recommend it to anyone developing software on a daily basis.

Practices of an Agile Developer

On the flights down to FL, I was able to read a book that my team will be reviewing in the upcoming months, Practices of an Agile Developer by Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt.



The authors chose a style that I think captures the bipolar disorder shared by most cognizant software developers. It presents topics both from the perspective of the devil who might encourage us to "just duplicate this code, don't bother keeping the system DRY" and the angel who would give us a gentle reminder that "duplication is just a shortcut, and you will have to maintain both sets of code later on". It's amazing how many times you find yourself listening to that devil on a daily basis.

The book is very easy to read even if you don't have a ton of time to devote to it. Chapters are usually 30 pages or under and each one is broken into a number of atomic topics. 'Fixed Prices are Broken Promises' and 'Architects Must Write Code' were two which immediately struck a chord with me.

Additionally, the book has a ton of good quotes that should be tattooed on the back of our hands or at least put on a whiteboard in plain view. My favorites are "Blame doesn't fix bugs", "Negativity kills innovation", and "Blindly picking a framework is like having kids to save taxes".

All in all, a very good read and immediately applicable to developers both agile and not.