Things Every Programmer Should Know [wiki] | Hacker News Reader

Things Every Programmer Should Know [wiki]

programmer.97things.oreilly.com

38 pointsTrevorBurnham10 comments

This is the official site for an O'Reilly book that came out recently. The contents of the book can be found on this page: http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Contri...

Here's the book's Amazon page: http://www.amazon.com/Things-Every-Programmer-Should-Know/dp...

the thing is, you browse the first half dozen articles and there's no programming in there. You can't expect it to help you become a better programmer if there are no good code examples to follow. Anything else is just lip service.

IMHO you'd be better off with Bently's "Programming Pearls".

I don't agree on the code examples, I think it can be a good book without code examples however this is not a good one :)

As a replacement I'd recommend Code Complete and Pragmatic Programmer

Those books are both good suggestions too ;)

Am I the only one who thinks the default font is a bit small? A minor quibble, perhaps.

Why 97?

Because 97 is two less than the product of two ones (eleven) and one number less than ten.

The same calculations lead me to believe that the world will end in 2012!

I've recently read the book actually only first "20~ things" out of it and it's a pretty bad book. I stopped reading after 20.

On paper "97 things" idea seems great but in practice it's pretty much rubbish. I've read 97 things a project manager should know as well and that wasn't good either.

Could you elaborate on why you think it's bad?

- It's writing style is bad, somehow consistently bad

- Structure is no good (I think this is expected though) but I was looking for an overall consistency like in Founders at work.

- Most of the advices written in many words but can be summed to 2 sentences. And rest of the text doesn't elaborate the reasons like they supposed to mostly they are there to fill up space.

Overall I don't have one bad thing but it's like reading a bad novel, you don't feel like that the author or the book has a soul.

Again Founders at Work is a perfect example of having multiple people to contribute but keeping the book in a good writing format.

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