From Journeyman to Master - The Pragmatic Programmer

I enjoyed reading "The pragmatic programmer". It transcends process and discusses the fundamental aspects of software development. The book provides time and "buzz-word" invariant common-sense observations and tips about the practice. They are presented in a clear and straightforward manner, complete with many examples of actual code and actual tools. And herein lies my criticism. The code and tools are out of date. At this level of detail, they should be brought up to date.

As a journeyman, I am learning to respect the craft in a deeper way. I don't think you can beat that. Sometimes development can be tedious and it is easy to lose sight of our goals and ambitions. This book helped me reconnect with my passion in a better way. I learned to respect things such as editors. Before, I was just like the examples in the book. I didn't give a s***... I used notepad or sublime text. Now I can see the benefit of using emacs.

Thanks to Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, I can say that I am now a better grounded developer. I still have a long ways to go and I am no where near done with this book. I will be reading this one again and again.

As an experienced software developer, I was looking for a book that I could recommend to more junior members of my team to help them improve their skills. This book wasn't it. Although this book has a lot of very good advice in it, it's mostly a mile wide and an inch deep. For a junior developer not already familiar with these ideas, there isn't enough meat here for them to gain any real appreciation or understanding of the material.

In contrast, take Code Complete. It's *only* a book about code construction, a small portion of what Pragmatic Programmer tries to cover. And yet, Code Complete weighs in at nearly 900 pages, versus Pragmatic's 300 or so. The difference is detail. Code Complete really digs into each topic, explaining it completely and giving examples. It's a bigger read to be sure, but when you're done, you have truly learned something. When you finish Pragmatic Programmer, you're left wanting another book that actually explains everything you just read.

As an experienced programmer, project manager and an MCSE, I valued all of the tips and advice in this book. It is written for the seasoned professional to the novice, it is a valuable book for all computer professionals.

This book uses great and memorable analogies and is easy to read.

Have the benefit of hindsight before creating your next software project. That's essentially what this book will teach you to do. Understand how you can make your software flexible and scale-able as well as maintainable for future engineers. I would highly advise taking notes as you read this book as you will want to reference the principals taught in the book in the future.

This book contains useful information for novice programmers. The tips are good, but nothing new for experienced programmers. I think anyone who has undertaken more than three or four projects will know 90% of the content from experience already. I'm personally not getting enough from this book to justify the time it takes to read it.

For complete novices, this book may be a good work book to keep around as they mature.

The authors of the book have a "light" writing style that makes this an easy book to read. The book is full of wisdom and insight with nothing too groundbreaking inside. The book provides plenty of solid theory that can be applied at the reader's discretion as applications and programming environments allow. As you might have surmised, the author's suggest you be practical in your approach to development. If I had to find something wrong with the book it would be that the authors get so pragmatic that their ideas almost become impractical. When I read a book like this I am always thinking, "Could I convince my development team of these ideas?" If I think I can't because the benefits are not an easy sell then I consider the idea impractical.

The book is a little better than average but 3 ½ stars was not an option. Reading the book was like going to see an OK movie. You don't think it was a waste of money, but you probably won't rent it again.

It is quite interesting to see that the advices in this book still hold true (in my personal experience at least), as if all that has changed is technology and some practices got new (buzzword) names.
I would still recommend reading this book as it puts all the important stuff in one handy place.

The first chapter is bland but the great tips and stories begin in the second chapter. So please have patience while you make your way through the first chapter. I am still reading though but it has helped me review the skills needed to be a good software engineer. You may know of some of them but reading them will etch them in your brain.

The expectations were high, and I must say they delivered for the most part. There was some really antiquated stuff there, and there was some Java stuff there (I have an aversion to Java), but aside from that, it had some pretty insightful stuff.

Good book but the Kindle version has some bugs... sometimes it jumps to unexpected places when you try to go to the next page.. It does not happen to other books I have on the same Kindle just this one.

Yes, some of the advice is obvious, and falls into the category of mom and apple pie. But some is surprising, and equally true. I very much enjoyed reading the book and comparing their nuggets of wisdom with my own experiences.

The Pragmatic Programmer is a book that describes a no non-sense approach to programming. The book covers a lot of ground, from work philosophy, to coding practices to testing to project management. The book offers good advice. The style is engaging. However I am still very disappointed by the book. Why? I found that most topics are better dealt with in other books and chapters are often too short to really do justice to the topics. For example, work philosophy is better handled in 'Please Don't Just Do What I Tell You, Do What Needs to Be Done', coding and testing are much better handled in 'Code Complete', patterns by the gang of four.

The Pragmatic Programmer is a nice book for starting programmers or for a fun read. But the return on investment is very low for a professional programmer.

The book go far from best practices in software developments, it's included an excellent view of all aspects that have influence in get the job done. Even if you are not a developer, you should read it.

My brother is a computer scientist - I gave him this gift after several programmers at my current job recommended it as a must. He loved the book and thought it provided solid guidance on how to improve his current skills.