Steve McConnell

Pragmatic Programmer, Art of Unix Programming, and Code Complete (in that order because of page count) are the books that I recommend these days to junior devs

> It is not overly opinionated, it is direct, it tries to support the statements it makes.

Totally. I appreciated that he actually cited actual studies of commercial software projects, such comparisons of defects found in code reviews vs tests or defects vs function length.

What books of Bob's do you think manipulate you? Specifically the books, rather than blog posts or tweets.

FWIW, one useful tidbit from Uncle Bob that I keep thinking about is how the number of working programmers has doubled every five years.

http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html

That insight helped me calm down quite a bit. Because noobs are being produced faster than best practices can percolate. Per Mark Twain's quip about lies racing half-way around the world before truth can get its pants on, every generation thinking they invented sex, and how people are generally emotionally attached to their first notions (no matter how wrong).

(So if your introduction to computing is thru Python, PHP, JavaScript or whatever, it's super hard to see their flaws, or to appreciate what their precedents were trying to achieve.)

I appreciate Uncle Bob's opinionated approach. The easy path would be to remain agnostic on which way is best. But that often, at least for me, results in design paralysis as I try to figure out that magic best way to organize a project or accomplish some task.

Instead, if I start with an opinion, I'm able to make immediate progress even if I end up refactoring down the road for some reason or another.

Of course there's no single write way to organize projects and write software. But one mediocre way that makes sense to me right now is often preferable to 10 better ways that I don't yet understand.

I like Clean Code and Code Complete.

Clean Code has a narrative and is opinionated. It explains the experiences that formed those opinions. It is a better read.

Code Complete is dry, academic, and comprehensive for its scope. It references many studies and is well documented. It has opinions too of a sort. It is a better reference.

Thinking of function length - Clean Code says short functions are good. Code Complete references studies that say it is not long functions that are bad, it is functions using too many objects/variables that are bad. This of course has an indirect effect on function length. So I keep this in mind, and both books are helpful.

I read a bunch of Uncle Bob's books and usually don't mind him being opinionated, although I did think the opinions in Clean Coder got to be too much. Although not all of it. Recently I have been mulling the idea from that book that there should be zero regressions. I think there is something to that, if you start to accept there can be 2-3 regressions per sprint, then why not 5-7? Why not 10? I agree with him that acceptance of regressions is a problem.

Similar thoughts. I have worked with some folks who basically just do 'java' all day. It's a web app, but there's a team who gets to pretty much do just 'java' - little to no web stuff, little SQL (that's another team), and... There have been times over the years when I've been envious of that type of situation, but then I think I'd hate it. But I sort of hate the current state working across all things web.

You forgot 'SQL' (or broad 'data management and access'), as well as security and performance stuff in your list above.

I don't want to be a 'stick in the mud' but.. I also resist some of the newer/shinier things, precisely because they don't always stick around (and I've been burned). But also, I don't really have time/bandwidth to be an expert. Doing server mgt, security, etc half-assed, by just following a couple of readmes... that can lead to lots of trouble.

For me code complete helped me write decent code around these things. No framework will write your business logic. As an asidev there's a really stand out section called Table Driven Methods, he shows how to go from nested if hell to so simple it's mind boggling. Also on the way he detours into the OO approach which doesn't help simplify things at all. I've never seen anything like this advice anywhere else. Also for beginners just explaining how to name functions and variables is great. In fact I worked with a so called senior dev who was naming things terribly.

Yep. That's what I was thinking, but not what I wrote. Sincerely thanks for pointing that out.

Most of us couldn't care less. Or could we? I forget which.

Dan’s writing is really informative. I also really admire the way that he uses Twitter. I’ll often see a recent tweet from him that is part of a long running topic thread that he appends to when he has something new to say.