The Productive Programmer

by Neal Ford and David Bock

Book Overview

Anyone who develops software for a living needs a proven way to produce it better, faster, and cheaper. The Productive Programmer offers critical timesaving and productivity tools that you can adopt right away, no matter what platform you use. Master developer Neal Ford not only offers advice on the mechanics of productivity-how to work smarter, spurn interruptions, get the most out your computer, and avoid repetition-he also details valuable practices...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596519788
• ISBN13: 9780596519780
• Release Date: August 2008
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 222 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Concise work for productive, common sense development

This is a terrific book for boosting your productivity in two areas: how you work, and how you code. The first section of the book, Mechanics, focuses on tools you can use to boost your productivity as you're working with your system. Ford launches off into an exploration of lots of little crazy tools that help you automate or ease repetitive tasks. You'll find lots of goodies from virtual desktops to shortcut tips/launchers, to using Ruby to script everything from splitting up SQL to automatically sorting your laundry and washing it for you.[1] All these little tools and tricks add up to drastic decreases in the amount of friction you're forced to suffer through while doing your daily job. Cutting this friction lets you focus on the job at hand, instead of trying to bend your environment to your will. The second section of the book, Practice, discusses ways to speed your development. There's an awful lot of goodness in this portion of the book, ranging from re-emphasizing critical aspects of object oriented programming, to object and method composition. Ford walks through a lot of great stories meant to get you to re-evaluate why you do things a certain way. The infamous Angry Monkeys story gets pulled out as an example, and Ford also concisely covers development principles like the Law of Demeter, Occam's Razon, and his Polyglot Programming meme. The book's concise, amazingly well written, and a definite must-have for your bookshelf.

Simply Briliant!

Simply brilliant - that's what this book is. Reading this book is like having Neal sitting next to you in a paired-programming session showing you exactly how to make your life as a developer more productive. The book is easy to read, conversational in tone, and very easy to follow. I recommend reading this book from start to finish to understand the concepts Neal is trying to get across. Then, starting over in front of your computer and rereading the book, directly applying his shortcuts and techniques. I applied this technique after giving up reading this book in the living room (too many dog-ear pages and "oh, I'll have to remember that one"). While Neal's examples are great, his concepts are even better. Live the concepts, find your own accelerators and focus techniques, and become a more productive programmer. Oh, and buy this book!

outstanding conversation with a mentor

I loved this book. At first, I wasn't too impressed since I could summarize the book as I went along into simple phrases (use command line, use scripting languages,...). But after a while, as I stacked cogent advice atop cogent advice, the stack became too big and suddenly I was buried in an avalanche of experience and wisdom. I am a well-educated, experienced software engineer, and I was already familiar with maybe half to three-quarters of what Neal discusses, but seeing this all together in a seamless weave of hard-won, practical experience was a revelation to me. Reading this book was like pair-programming with the mentor I had always hoped to have but never met.

pragmatic micro efficiencies & tools

This is a great book about micro efficiencies and tools. It's a great source of information for analytical tools as well! (like coverage tools, bug finding tools, code analysis tools). All in all, i loved it because there's no other book like it. A "must have" for any programmer's library right along side refactoring, legacy code, and 'the pragmatic programmer'.

Essential Reading for Every Developer

I've been reading Neal's blog for a while so when this book was launched I wanted to get a copy. I expected a more esoteric book from Neal, but this book was exceptionally applicable. His advice on the nature of being productive including links to specific tools impressed me a lot. I also admired his even handedness in his treatment of operating systems. Its hard to find someone that will talk about Microsoft and Apple technologies without religiocity. When it was good in Windows, he mentioned it. When it was good in OSX, he mentions it. On the writing side, his prose is well thought out and exceptionally readable. You can get through the book pretty quickly but I found my self post-it noting a bunch of pages to revisit. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to every developer, no matter your technology (Windows, OSX, .NET, Java, RoR, etc.)