Amazon.ca:Customer reviews: 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 11, 2015

Excellent book with good points for the novice and the expert. Its simple to focus on but has some powerful parts to it.

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Paul Dhani

Good for someone who is new

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 19, 2013

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Good guide or instructions for someone who is entering into the programming world. It would nice to provide scenarios with code examples.

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mko

get knowledge regarding most valuable programming practices

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on July 26, 2011

What I have liked from the very beginning of the book, was the way the content description was organized. There are two tables of content ' first one, regular one, second one divides book into different categories, thus you can read just essays related to particular topic. Another great advantage of the book is the way essays were prepared ' two pages per each of them. No wasted space, no elaborates, just the core of the problem that is discussed. The same thing refers to the index ' I like books where you can find things within index easily and accurately.

Technical part of the book is the one side of he coin, second one is the content. 97 Things' is a book that covers topics you can find in many other books (Pragmatic Programmer, Agile Developer, Developers Notebook, Productive Programmer). What distinguish this book is the way topics are presented. Authors do not go deeply into details, they just sketch the issue, provide readers with the starting point and don't give them 'silver bullet'. Many times you will fell like ' 'hey, I knew that already' ' but that's OK, because you started to think about the again. I liked the book, I liked the topics, however different style of each essay might be confusing a little bit. If you like consistent style over the whole book, this will be a drawback. Another thing is ' if you have read books like Pragmatic Programmer or Practices of an Agile Developer, rethink buying this book. You might feel disappointed. If you haven't read them ' it might be a good starting point for getting a better programmer.

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brcline

Four Stars

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on December 5, 2014

Well written and contains many short but very good tips.

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Noah Moerbeek

Some Beneficial Advice and Maxims

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 9, 2013

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97 things every programmer should know is a light easy read that is broad enough to appeal to anyone who works in code or on software projects in general.

I found essays like "How to Implement Doing it Right vs Getting it Done" to be very helpful and wise. That essay included pratical advice that we were able to apply by changing our design for our in house bug tracking software to include a technical debt tracker. "Coding with Reason" included some decent maxims that I hope my programmers implement, and I will be checking for in future code reviews. It is for these excellent essays among others that the book is worth reading.

As a software development manager who also gets involved in the business side of things I was amused at how occasionally at the contradiction that exist between the business world and the software development world. In the essay "The Professional Programmer" that emphasized among other things that programmers should not tolerate bug lists and take responsibility for training themselves (I agree). However, I know that often times programmers have little control over their time and I know that our fallen nature inclines people who self study (if they do it all) often times to study what they like rather than what is useful to the company. In my knowledge of Business management the opposite advice is given, that in order to keep a motivated workforce the employer needs to provide training and/or training opportunities. Essays pushing pair programming made a good argument for it, but excluded what practical ideas can be implemented if such a thing is not possible.

Sometimes I did not always agree with all the essays nor did I think that certain maxims should be elevated to the level of dogmas. Where the book suffered was that some of the essays selected seemed to reiterate points that where already made in other essays.

I would recommend this book and I will even be using it for our in house book club.

8 people found this helpful

A

Not very insightful

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 11, 2022

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The book reads like a series of short blog posts by different authors. I say that because of the writing quality and level. Unfortunately, I didn't find anything particularly insightful, as most of the articles deal with high level ideas but don't have enough space to expound on them.

Simon

Misleading Title!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 14, 2012

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This is a great book, but the title is misleading. If you are an experienced programmer, you probably know most of the 97 things printed in this book and marked as every programmer should know! For novice programmers, however, there exists some golden wisdom that only comes by years of hard work, experience, and frustrations. As being said, this book doesn't teach you programming, but only some wisdom to help you overcome or prevent some of the frustration down the road.

This book lists collected essays from experienced programmers. The essays are short and only two pages long. They are easy to read and follow, but they are sorted in alphabetical order by their titles. Hence, the back-to-back essays are not necessarily content related, and you can just read any one of them as you please. For those who prefer to read related things in certain order, there is a section in the beginning of the book that lists essays with associated page numbers in predefined categories like: Bug and Fixes; Build and Deployment; Code Guidelines and Code Layout; Error Handling; and etc. Overall, it has an easy layout.

There is now a Kindle Edition of this book that was not available when I purchased it a few months ago. If you own an Amazon Kindle, or an iPad or any other E-Book reader, you may find e-book to be a better choice. Since the essays are short, you can read small portions easier on the e-book when you are on your breaks or on the road.

If you are in your golden age of programming, you may not find this book very useful. However, if you are just started and hungry for more, you will find enough satisfying information that makes this book worth having. Either way, hope this mini review help you further in your decision.

10 people found this helpful

James Ingram

A good and valuable read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 25, 2010

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I didn't agree with everything in the book, but I agreed with most of it. Some of it I consider a little basic (if you're having to convince developers of the value of code reviews, for example, then you've got much bigger problems than a book on good practices can sort out for you).

But on the whole I found it engaging, well-written, and well-argued.

Best of all: each chapter is at most two pages long, so everything is in nice bite-sized chunks, just right for sparking discussion or for dipping into from time to time.

I can't tell precisely how good the whole book is: my lead architect asked to borrow it before I had finished it: that was two months ago, and I've not seen it since...

6 people found this helpful

Jeremy Webb

If you’ve been programming for a few years, this will not be news to you.

Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on March 15, 2023

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There’s nothing inherently wrong with this book. However, if you have, even if only for a short time, actually worked in software none of this will be news, interesting or anything other than second nature to you.

Pickup a different book instead.

Anon

Random interresting thoughts

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on October 30, 2012

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(warum auch immer ich den titel gerade in englisch geschrieben habe).
Habe das Buch nach einer Empfehlung (ich glaube auf Slashdot) gekauft und war großteils von der Lektüre begeistert. Die kurzen Happen von jeweils zwei Seiten bieten ein gutes Format um in einer kleinen Pause oder vor dem Zu-Bett-Gehen wieder einen Abschnitt zu lesen und sind trotzdem lang genug um die präsentierten Ideen ausreichend auszuführen und Denkanstöße zu geben.
Das Format der eigenständigen Artikel hat allerdings auch seine Eigenheiten, manche gut, manche schlecht:
- sehr gut finde ich dass teilweise der selbe Aspekt aus unterschiedlichen Richtungen und sich daraus ergebenden unterschiedlichen Beurteilungen behandelt wird
- im Gegensatz dazu sind manche Themen auch mehrfach aus der gleichen oder zumindest sehr ähnlichen Perspektive beschrieben wodurch die Sektionen redundant wirken

Auf jeden Fall eine Lektüre die ihr Geld wert war. Ich werde das Buch sicher noch ein zweites Mal durchgehen um mir interessante Ideen zu notieren.

2 people found this helpful

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5 star		53%
4 star		25%
3 star		13%
2 star		6%
1 star		3%

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