For some time I have been interested in books about style/philosophy of a programmer's job. A lot of techniques and concepts can be found in general psychology of work (how to improve productivity, how to better use our brain, etc, etc), but there are some books that are particularly focused at programmers.
In this post I would like to write about interesting books/resources that I've found recently. I think that after reading and DOING/USING ideas from those books life of a programmer can be improved.
edw519
free book from Ed Weissman
This is some unique book with unique style... actually it is a collection of his activity in various forums and from his own blog posts. As a programmer, he wrote some code to gather all of those pieces of text and make a nice, readable book :)
Some interesting parts and ideas:
- What’s it like to be a programmer?
- Passion: "The reason you’re not passionate about your work is because something is missing. Identifying what is missing is your first step in determining where to go from here."
- about doing:
- Find what you have to do. If there is nothing important... just grab anything...
- Start doing it
- simple :)
- Have a computer to work and a computer with internet connection.
- If you are bored, depressed by your work try to get even simple task and do it.
- try to be"fearless programmer"
- coding mode, not coding mode, analysis mode, etc - focusing on a single task
- lots of information about CV/interviews
- lots of business advices
All in all this book can be read in several hours. There are lots of links, short messages and it can be read in various direction and orders.
In conclusion It seems that EDW is a titan of work, but I hope that everyone, after some hard training and practice, can be at least 50% as productive as he is.
image from: http://openclipart.org/detail/58345/man-at-work-by-cybergedeon-58345