Reviews
Great book for every coders, mostly based on the author’s perspective but really useful, informative and including a lot of hands-on stuff. It’s worth reading.
I have no idea who this author is and why this book has such a good rating, but the author seems to be pretty full of himself and repeats the same 3 stories over and over again which he seems to find relevant in every situation. He is of the opinion (and his opinions are all over this book without much backing) that coders should be ‘professional’ like engineers and lawyers and doctors, which to him means working 60 hours a week, by adding ‘just’ 3 hours of self study every day. Do you really think all lawyers work 60 hours a week? Besides his personal opinions I think this book might only be relevant to you if you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade and only now discovered things like ‘testing’ and ‘continuous integration’. The book is basically outdated already and won’t teach you anything if you’ve worked at a modern tech company in the past five years. Side note; I get that the author wants this book to fit in with his other book ‘clean code’ but he should’ve just called it ‘the professional coder’ because that’s what this book wants to be about. If you want to be a clean coder just take a bath or something. Did not finish, refunded.
This is my second time reading, so it has to be good. It tells you how to be a good professional programmer. A must read.
Uncle Bob is again extreme and depicts a person, who is our asymptotical goal, not something anybody can achieve. The super-human (a.k.a. The Clean Coder) is always responsible for her actions, can say No even in the toughest times and to the toughest managers and clients, sleeps at least 7 hours per day, spends 20 hours per week for her personal professional development, regularly does programming kata, does TDD 100% of the time, doesn't write features unless there are acceptance tests, doesn't need the zone, cares about the business goals as much for the technical quality, writes checks if she caused problems, refactors mercilessly. In a couple of places Uncle Bob mixed up levels of abstraction and implying implementation details (TDD), when the higher goal of having working code should have been the primary focus. Also, some of the stories weren't the best examples. 70s were different times :-) In general I liked it a lot. Learned a few things, but I had heard the most in some form before. It's good recommendation for friends, though.
Good lessons from a life of coding.
