The Pragmatic Programmer: 20th Anniversary Edition
6 days ago
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- The Pragmatic Programmer is a valuable guide for software engineers, especially beginners, offering timeless advice alongside updates in its 20th anniversary edition.
- Key principles include taking responsibility for your work, avoiding broken windows in software, and continuously learning beyond your specialty.
- The book emphasizes the importance of communication, documentation, and involving users in quality decisions.
- Decoupling, DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself), and orthogonality are highlighted as essential for maintainable and flexible code.
- Tracer bullet development and prototyping are recommended for early feedback and learning, respectively.
- Debugging tips include fixing problems, not assigning blame, and writing tests to prevent future bugs.
- Design by contract and using assertions help ensure code reliability, with an emphasis on crashing early to avoid worse failures.
- The book advises against over-abstracting for future flexibility, suggesting instead to focus on likely changes.
- Parallelism and concurrency are discussed with warnings about shared state and the pitfalls of resource locking.
- Testing is framed as a way to get immediate feedback and improve design, not just to find bugs.
- Requirements gathering is likened to therapy, emphasizing the need to help users articulate what they truly want.
- Agile is presented as a mindset of continuous improvement, not a set of rigid processes.
- Team-level advice includes doing what works for your context, delighting users beyond just delivering code, and taking pride in your work.