The Pragmatic Programmer
From this day forth, I have decided to develop my love for reading. I have made a reading goal of minimum 10 books a year, including technical and non technical books. Majority of them are going to be technical but I will get my hands to some non technical ones too. I am going to avoid love stories and pure fiction ones.
Okay, the reason for this much rambling on the net? So that I can stick to my commitment I made on the public internet.
My first book was The Pragmatic Programmer. I was writing this article just an hour after I was done with the book.
Many technical blogs recommended this book. So I went for this one. In short, this book is great and really can change the mind of even a budding software developer like me.
A quick summary of the book can be found here.
Through out the book the author focuses on describing very essential pillars that make one a Pragmatic Programmer.
Very important yet simple take aways from them are :
- Always back up your code and use a VCS.
- Use tried and tested design patterns like Orthogonality, tracer bullets, prototyping etc.
- Use one source code editor and be very familiar with it. You will save loads of time.
- Power of debugging and testing.
- Internal and external documentation of code.
- Taking ownership of your code can make huge difference in promising its quality.
- Don’t program by coincidence. Fully understand and test what code you are writing.
- Test driven development can be a very a handy technique. But not always.
- How to write requirements and specifications for the software.
- At last. Handle the users expectation with care. Never under or over deliver. Yet don’t miss to surprise the user with something to show that you care about their expectations.
It has been fun reading this book. I read most of the book while travelling in bus when I was in Bangalore for internship. Perfect utilization of 2 hour travel time. I will always wonder why this book is not a part of syllabus of CS/IT students.
Priyank Verma 
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