Just read the DRY chapter, you can read it for free to get a feel of the book if you follow the link. Looks good to me, I will be picking this up.
The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition
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Re: The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition
#12There's some good advice in the book, but I found the majority of it seems to be rather goldilocks flavored. Implement the features you need, but don't add too many, but don't omit important ones either. Write some documentation, but not too much or too little. Etc. You read it, and oh yes, very wise, but not really helpful? Not much here would be useful in resolving a dispute between two programmers, one who wants t…
Might be brutally simply and obvious but still too many people manage to not achieve it. Appreciate a practical framework for how to measure too simply vs too complicated might be helpful, but often I suspect teams aren't remotely interested in a "let's not overcomplicate this" influence.
My own thoughts on this btw: https://mcconnellsoftware.github.io/struggle-design-balance/
Re: The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition
#13The original version of this book is something I'll always treasure. It sits next to "Code Complete", the Gang of Four's "Design Patterns" book and Martin Fowler's "Refactoring" on my top shelf and I still read parts of it every year.
Add Fogel's "Producing Open Source Software" and Brooks' Mythical Man Month and you've perfectly described my shelf too. I found most of those when I was a lowly junior developer and they were instrumental in shaping my thinking, approach, and understanding of tradeoffs.
I'd love to see more people pick them up.
Re: The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition
#14There's some good advice in the book, but I found the majority of it seems to be rather goldilocks flavored. Implement the features you need, but don't add too many, but don't omit important ones either. Write some documentation, but not too much or too little. Etc. You read it, and oh yes, very wise, but not really helpful? Not much here would be useful in resolving a dispute between two programmers, one who wants t…
I'll agree with your summary, but I'll also argue that moderation is often a lesson coders need to learn/remember. It is easy to "know" in theory but become dogmatic in practice. There are reasons we are still learning the lessons from 30+ years ago - we keep getting dogmatic about concepts that interfere.
I think GP's point is that saying "you need to do X, Y, Z" in moderation" carries nearly zero bits of information. Of course I don't want to overdo or underdo something. But how much is too much? How much is too little? How do I know? And since code is something that accumulates over time, how do I maintain the balance?
Answers to these questions is what's needed for coders to do a good job. The original book does encourage you to think about it, but doesn't provide many answers. The way I remember it, it was very useful at introducing you to concepts, so that you know that X, Y and Z are a thing in the first place.
Re: The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition
#15The original version of this book is something I'll always treasure. It sits next to "Code Complete", the Gang of Four's "Design Patterns" book and Martin Fowler's "Refactoring" on my top shelf and I still read parts of it every year.
Kernighan and Pike’s “the practice of programming” is up there with those on my shelf.
Re: The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition
#16The original version of this book is something I'll always treasure. It sits next to "Code Complete", the Gang of Four's "Design Patterns" book and Martin Fowler's "Refactoring" on my top shelf and I still read parts of it every year.
Would you still recommend the original version? I have a printed copy and tried to read it ages ago, but gave up (it bore me). I am sure I'd appreciate it better now, but with a new edition coming out I'd be wondering whether I'm missing out.
Re: The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition
#17There’s been a lot of love for this book, but I found the title to be jarring. When I was given the book to read, I was doing a lot of maintenance work, and was doing a lot of ‘duct tape and bailing wire’ kinds of fixes to keep the systems functional, while slowly addressing the root causes of downtime and issues. To me this was truly pragmatic programming, but nothing in the first few chapters even tries to deal with the levels of pragmatism I needed in my day job that had far too many night time wake up calls. I couldn’t finish it. Any wisdom the book may have was lost to me, and I’ll likely never pick up the book again, I associate it with too much PTSD from that time in my life...
Re: The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition
#18There's some good advice in the book, but I found the majority of it seems to be rather goldilocks flavored. Implement the features you need, but don't add too many, but don't omit important ones either. Write some documentation, but not too much or too little. Etc. You read it, and oh yes, very wise, but not really helpful? Not much here would be useful in resolving a dispute between two programmers, one who wants t…
People have a tendency to become extremists. I sometimes think of it as a ridge, with cliffs on both sides. People look at one of the cliffs, and back away from it, because it's a cliff, and it's dangerous, and so they're going to make sure that they don't fall off of it. But they get so focused on that cliff that they forget that there's also a cliff on the other side.
So in that sense, the advice is good and necessary. But it's kind of not, because the kind of person who needs the advice isn't often the kind of person who reads such a book.
Re: The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition
#19Re: The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition
#20There’s been a lot of love for this book, but I found the title to be jarring. When I was given the book to read, I was doing a lot of maintenance work, and was doing a lot of ‘duct tape and bailing wire’ kinds of fixes to keep the systems functional, while slowly addressing the root causes of downtime and issues. To me this was truly pragmatic programming, but nothing in the first few chapters even tries to deal wit…
> I couldn’t finish it. Any wisdom the book may have was lost to me, and I’ll likely never pick up the book again, I associate it with too much PTSD from that time in my life...
I have that problem with a few unfortunately good albums, but never would have thought that might apply to someone with a book.