Ok, the title is a bit misleading – it’s a play of words(*). This entry is actually a book preview on the upcoming book “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know” from O’Reilly.
97 Things Of Wisdom
The “97 Things” series started out with “97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know” early last year. The book essentially is a collection of short articles on specific topics that should bother today’s software architect. You may classify as a software architect if you don’t just stir up source code but are also in charge to give the system a shape.
The articles are straight to the point and can be read within five minutes each. Don’t expect detailed textbook chapters of the topics, but they work extremely well as creative appetizers. And there are nearly a hundred appetizers from well-respected members of the software architect community in this book.
Just imagine you would meet all the authors for five minutes each on a conference and just ask them for an appealing thought. This book serves as the best replacement for it.
Wisdom continued
Soon after the first book, there was a second book in the series, “97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know”. I haven’t read this one yet, but it is on my must-read list for 2010.
And now, next month, there will be another book, this time for the fellow coder: “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know”. As usual, there are 97 selected articles with bits of wisdom from big community names. Kevlin Henney is the editor for this book (we featured him in our last blog harvest). You can take a sneak peek online in the 97TEPSK wiki, where the articles were fostered (and a second part is likely to emerge). But don’t forget to buy a paper copy that you can foist on your peers to inspire them, too.
Telling from the articles I’ve read so far, the book will be great. Please don’t expect detailed language specifics, lengthy code examples or fancy UML diagrams. But expect a whole bunch of great ideas that stem from real experiences of real programmers.
One percent of a book
What’s our relation to the new book? We’ve contributed an article to it! Even if we thereby only wrote approximately one percent of the book, it feels great and we consider ourselves honored.
The topic of our article is Extreme Feedback Devices (XFD): “Let Your Project Speak for Itself”. We gathered quite a lot of these devices over the years and ran a few experiments, so we thought we are qualified to write about it. And there it is, the first bit of our wisdom, printed in a book.
We will, of course, continue to publish our wisdom on this blog first. If you’ve followed us over the last years, the article comes as no real surprise. But I’m sure some other articles of the book will. Go buy it!
(*) Play of words in a language other than your native tongue are always dangerous. I hope this one worked out well.
Schneide Blog 