Hacker News Reader

Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

I found the book underwhelming after all the praise I had read of it, because it seemed little more than a collection of common knowledge - I didn't get much out of it. On the other hand, for people very new to the craft, it may be more valuable for precisely the same reason.

View on HN

You also have to keep in mind that this book was written 10+ years ago, when most of this was not actually common knowledge. :)

And that some common knowledge only appears to be.

Programming bloggers have strip-mined it for material over the years, so you've probably already read much of it by osmosis.

I prefer _The Practice of Programming_ by Kernighan and Pike, personally.

This, and it's also a great book to give to junior hires or interns.

Most of the stuff mentioned in the book should be covered in schools, but usually isn't.

If you found it underwhelming, you're probably a pretty good programmer, knowledgable about best practices.

This is more for people who aren't (yet).

A lot of the chapters are just a "word soup" with a bunch of motivational words and vague admonitions. For such a non-technical and imprecise book, I'm surprised how widely lauded it is among software engineers.

For me, the "word soup" was the authors trying to get across why they did the specific things they did. While many of the individual practices are widely known today, knowing the underlying why is the only way to get real value out of the techniques or to let you know when you should abandon or adapt them.

Yeah, I enjoyed it when I first read it (about when it first came out), but I tried to reread it more recently, and found it patronising. I think these pragmatic programmer books are like the pop-psychology of programming books. They're easy to read, written in a light humorous style, but have low density of information and lack deep insight.

This was the best out of their books that I've read, and at the time, like I mentioned, I enjoyed it and got a lot from it. Not now though.

"Common knowledge is not so common".

Especially true in IT, IMHO.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com