Book review: The Pragmatic Programmer by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt
As you would expect from a passionate geek, I love books about programming but I also enjoy reads about self-development. It’s hard to find a combination of these two categories in one publication but I found one! And I can’t recommend it enough - “The Pragmatic Programmer” by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt.
I’ve heard about this book a lot in the past and I regret that I didn’t pick it up at an earlier stage of my career. This book contains 53 topics about specific aspects of a software developers everyday life, from high-level subjects like communication to very detailed recommendations about writing good, testable code. You can tell that both authors are experienced programmers who value practicality over theoretical gibberish.
As I mentioned before, I consider this book a must-read for everyone working in this field. So, let me leave you with the last tip from this book and for sure the most important one.
It is your life. Share it. Celebrate it. Build it. And have fun!
Today is the age of pragmatic programmers not programmers. What it takes to turn a programmer into a pragmatic programmer is subtly described in this book. Although it is primarily intended to be read by programmers, what I found down the line was an invaluable set of insights for life alongside programming. It's not even an overestimation to say at some points the psychological side of this book takes precedence over its programming side. We're primarily programmers of our lives, so generalizing correspondent terms to both life and programming is not surprising.