 "Its already all been said before." | 2009-09-16 |
| - Reviewed By User: A2LYYUTJF0EKYI |
| Id write my own full length review but... I cant think of anything else to praise this book about that hasn't already been praised. Its a great book for both the novice and experienced programmer. If your serious about improving your software construction skills, this book is a MUST READ. It should be required reading for all programming degrees since it is pretty much language neutral. The lessons in this book will apply to pretty much any programming language out there at any time. |
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| "Best Programming practices book I ever read" | 2009-09-01 |
| - Reviewed By User: AMVYN9QGC8B3M |
| This is a great book! If you are intrested software design and coding, this book is a MUST! I've leared so many things i didn't know about in college. 100% recommended =) |
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 "Very good book, but you need other things as well" | 2009-08-21 |
| - Reviewed By User: ACZ1XOQ7XWM64 |
This is a very good book. It covers many aspects of the best practices in programming. But I think one should be able to come up with much of it when he has the mind set to write code that would allow people to understand and maintain.
I would also like to add that this book is focused on construction only, and so it has omitted some other important topics. For one thing, Data Structure and Algorithm is not discussed. I do not think one can become an efficient programmer without good knowledge in Data Structure and Algorithm. This book is like speech lesson in programming , which tells you how to express yourself so that people will have no problem understanding your code. However, if you do not have the right solution in the first place, why would it even matter if your code is clear and simple? To this end, I would recommend "The art of computer programming" by Donald Knuth.
To further my argument for the importance of Data Structure and Algorithm, you may go to http://www.careercup.com/ and check out the interview problems from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. See what the majority of the questions were concerning about. Why is so?
I would also like to mention that there are cases when using something less obvious and straight forward for the sake of performance is necessary. One has to understand the trade off between being close to man vs. close to machine. Seems to me that the book is largely about being close to man.
Overall, I think this is a very good book and I actually like it. |
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| "Highly recommended for beginners but not necessarily for veterans!" | 2009-08-15 |
| - Reviewed By User: A13LM63WUF77BL |
A very well-written, seminal book on software construction. It very effectively covers almost all of the important topics in software construction. This book partly also served as a revision of my software engineering classes in university. It very effectively, in fact blatantly reminds us that software engineering is all about managing complexity. However at the same time I have to be honest also in that it is not as "must have" as it is often projected. It also comes from the fact that for someone with 3-4+ years of professional experience, this book is not going to offer that much (though still recommended). With some 3.5 years working in industry, I already knew roughly some 70% of things told in this book. For example all those chapters on coding and naming conventions are not going to offer you much if you haven't already learned these things in first few years of your career. Many practices this book recommends are too good that are too obvious and many practices it condemns are too bad that make me wonder if people are really using them. Some chapters are really awesome, like "Design in Construction" and "Working Classes", some are very good such as "Managing Construction", most of them are good such as "Using Conditional" and "Unusual Control Structures", and a few are so so, e.g. "Layout and Style" , "Refactoring". Another problem with this book is that it is unnecessarily long, and verbose. It is composed of 35 chapters. In places it feels too redundant. In my opinion, the size of the book could have cut down by fixing these redundant things. e.g. why to include chapter 34, and why those Checklist sections? Also note that this book is more about coding than programming, e.g., it does not even remotely discuss data structures or algorithm analysis (Big O and stuff) etc.
Summary: Highly recommended to beginners in professional software development, moderately recommended to people with some experience, and not necessarily recommended to veterans. |
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| "A Book Should Be Read Every Year" | 2009-07-11 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1I72LJDQEC36N |
| The author shares his practical experience by this book. People who wants to be a good programmer should read this regularly. I believe you would benefit from this book |
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| "A must for every programmer" | 2009-06-25 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1ILBWKRLWN0UK |
| This is an excellent book. It covers topics that every programmer should be intimately familiar with. While some of the sections feel like they might be stating the obvious, they are still worth the read. Steve is an extremely talented writer, and can make even the most mundane of topics fun to read. If you are a new programmer, then I think this book is especially important for you, since it will guide you into the right habits from the very beginning. It is much harder to break bad habits, so if you're new to programming, don't just focus on learning how to program, read this book too and learn how to be a professional programmer. |
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