The Pragmatic Programmer

This book’s title is absolutely perfect! There’s no agenda here other than identifying things that will make you a more effective and productive programmer.

That leads to a book packed with solid advice, whether it’s about how to write code or how to think about your career. The authors are consultants, so there are plenty of clear and interesting examples drawn from many different problem domains. That’s super fun for someone like me who’s hyper-focused on a single kind of programming.

Here is a confession: I never got around to reading The Pragmatic Programmer. Not cover to cover, I mean. I read it in fragments, a page here and a chapter there.

I was usually prompted by a reference in a blog post or a conference talk. It's hard to read about programming today without stumbling on quotes from this 1999 book. The Pragmatic Programmer is choked full of ideas that are thought provoking, beautifully discussed, and, yes, pragmatic.

Riding on this book's success, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas went on to become publishers. When it came time to write my… show more.

The Pragmatic Programmer provides every tip an individual developer needs to produce high-quality code on schedule.

I had been a professional software engineer for 20 years when this book was first published. Every clever technique I had learned appeared in the book, along with a bunch of new ones.

It was so clear and useful, and now it is considered a classic.

A full collection of self-reflecting ideas about how to approach coding from a strategic point of view. While some of it can be a bit obvious for the experienced developer, it can be invaluable for the newcomer and it’s always great to solidify knowledge in a more consistent way. The kind of book that you can read again after a few years and keep learning.