The author shares his practical experience by this book. People who wants to be a good programmer should read this regularly. I believe you would benefit from this book
A must for every programmer
This is an excellent book. It covers topics that every programmer should be intimately familiar with. While some of the sections feel like they might be stating the obvious, they are still worth the read. Steve is an extremely talented writer, and can make even the most mundane of topics fun to read. If you are a new programmer, then I think this book is especially important for you, since it will guide you into the right habits from the very beginning. It is much harder to break bad habits, so if you're new to programming, don't just focus on learning how to program, read this book too and learn how to be a professional programmer.
An absolute must-read for programmers
This book's discussion of programming philosophy and code style is essential reading. It's used as a textbook in some undergraduate software architecture courses, but it's also friendly enough for independent study. This book made me rethink the way I'd been coding for years.
I'd also recommend the more recent Clean Code, especially for Java programmers, as it goes into more depth, even providing actual case studies in which code is dramatically cleaned up.
Just like Candy for Software Developers
Buy a stack of these books and put them on your desk to give away like candy to any software developers who wander in. It's the best thing you could do for your company and its products. In my opinion, this is simply the best book ever written for software developers. If you write software, no matter where your skill or experience level is at using the gems gleamed from this book will make you a better programmer. I have read this book, cover-to-cover a total of 3 times since it was originally published and each time I get something more/different from it. While most of tips seem obvious in retrospect, most things in there seem to escape the practice of most programmers. The style of the writing and layout of the graphical icons in the margins of book make it fun to read and all the hard data helps to drive each point/tip home....No professional programmer should be without this book!
Good practices based on hard data
This book is well known in China among programmers, the title was somehow
translated as "Code Encyclopedia", which is not very accurate, but captures the spirit, this book should be kept around, and picked up every now and then just as an encyclopedia.
Other than common pracices, the most valueble part of the book is
chapter 2 "Metaphors for a Richer Understanding of Software Development"
and chapter 33 "Personal Character", for example, the auther provides the following insights:
"Coincidentally, great intelligence is only loosely connected to being a good programmer."
"The people who are best at programming are the people who realize how small their brains are. They are humble. The people who are the worst at programming are the people who refuse to accept the fact that their brains aren't equal to the task. Their egos keep them from being great programmers. The more you learn to compensate for your small brain, the better a programmer you'll be. The more humble you are, the faster you'll improve."
Chapter 35: "Where to Find More Information" also introduced me to all the great books such as Gerald Weinberg's The Psychology of Computer Programming and Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls, 2d ed. (Bentley 2000) .
