Code Complete | Hacker News Reader

Code Complete

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ok I'll go against the grain here but I personally found this book very tedious and of little value to me. But then I had been programming professionally many years when I encountered this book so maybe I was not part of the intended audience.

(Then again I found "Godel, Escher, Bach", another book that is almost universally lauded hereabouts, to be frothy and pretentious. So maybe it is just that I am weird.)

I'm with you on Goedel, Escher, Bach. Also, thanks for "frothy and pretentious" - adding it to my verbal arsenal now...

I like CC but also agree it's of less use to the seasoned programmer than to beginners. Then again, seasoning doesn't necessarily produce good habits.

Plink, you should go over to Amazon and put in a review. There's like 150 reviews over there and none of them are less than 3 stars.

Seriously. If you have a detailed criticism, it could help others not waste their time with the book.

I find many computer books tedious. Computer literature, for some reason, has a much greater variation in styles than other forms of literature. Some books are basically just big lists, and folks love 'em.

I read the book early in my career, so maybe your point about timing is a good one. Don't know. I do know that unless you're just being snarky, having an alternate point of view can be very useful for folks choosing what to spend their time on. I really regretted not being able to ding this book more. It'd be good to see a more detailed negative review.

And GEB is on my short list :) I still have a dog-eared copy from 1995 or something.

Even as a seasoned developer I think the book has value when trying to make the case to less-seasoned colleagues that they might want to think more critically about how they are structuring their code.

Me too. I think the first couple chapters contained a few really valuable truths that resonated me way back when I read the thing.. the rest of book was bleh.

Code Complete was an epiphany for me. I read it right before graduating from university and it was great preparation for real-world programming work.

The other programming epiphany books for me were:

  * Eric Evans' "Domain-Driven Design"
  * Steve Maguire's "Writing Solid Code"
  * and SICP

This is one of the books I had waiting on the desk of any new employee that I hired in the last 5 years. The whole book is a must read, but for me personally I referenced the sections on coding conventions and defensive programming for new employees all of the time.

The other practice I picked up from Steve was stepping through each code execution branch in the debugger to informally confirm the correct behavior when I was building w/o explicit unit tests.

This is one of those books that sometimes I wish I could force people to read.

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