A book review

This blog post is about a book that I read for my English course assignment. Unfortunately I only had time to read the first chapter from the book before the deadlines hit me, but I found the book interesting and will probably try to finish it. The book was called “The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master” and I chose it because I found the topic interesting. Building pragmatic software might seem easy, but often software developers forget who they’re building the software for.

First chapter was called “Pragmatic Philosophy” and it covered seven different topics that all gave some advice on what kind of mindset to have while trying to build more pragmatic software. I honestly found all the tips and lessons useful and profound. Some of them I could associate myself better with but overall I think they were useful to know.

For example, one of the topics went through how good-enough software is important to recognize. This basically means that sometimes users might be satisfied with a product that meets the user requirements but still has some rough edges and fine tuning to be done. As a developer, sometimes it might be hard to recognize when to stop polishing your code and the software. The book gave an example from art painters point of view, that if you keep adding more and more layers to your painting while trying to polish it, the core of the painting will get lost in all the fine tuning and thereby lose its value.

I do agree with the author on the points and lessons the book taught me, but I think some of the lessons are hard to learn without personal experience. Best advice that I learnt from the book was probably the “good-enough software” advice that I explained earlier, since that’s something that can be applied to any software project. Hopefully I’ll learn some more once I’ve finished reading the book.