The Pragmatic Programmer 20th-anniversary edition
Do I really need to read the pragmatic programmer 20th anniversary edition? I mean I read the original one years ago and loved it. So why waste the time? Well to be honest because I loved it! Why not see what I forgot and what is new?
But I don't have time: I'm trying to bring my high blood pressure back down through exercise and getting my 135kg body through martial arts training and healthy eating while doing a full-time job. Frankly, I have a stack of new books to read some fiction, some fact and I'm studying Google's SRE so is another book really a good idea? Well, what programmer doesn't have a huge stack of books... Code Complete, SRE Workbook, Working with Legacy Code.
How about an audiobook? YES! Perfect. I can listen to it while I walk the dog and while I am cleaning the house! Which was a great idea, until the audiobook started trying to read a Linux grep instruction out loud. Soon after it was reading out semaphor code in the concurrency section and I quickly realised I needed to read it, in order to ... well ... read it.
Eventually, I did. Overall it was a great read and as always there were parts in it that I had forgotten over the last 4-5 years since I last read it. Well worth taking the time! The audiobook helped, but it sort of needed to pause and pop-up code on a window instead of reading it out loud.
To anyone thinking about reading this, go for it! It's oriented for junior programmers, which I was when I originally read it, but there are themes, which I recognise have been subtly around me for the last 5 years without me even noticing they were from the book. It definitely had a huge influence on my career and even if you only read the beginning there are some concepts such as the broken window example, which have really helped me in job interviews.
Graeme