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I just finished reading the Pragmatic Programmer for the first time and felt that it was pretty much a letdown. For one, it makes a huge number of claims but do

by iends 13y ago

I just finished reading the Pragmatic Programmer for the first time and felt that it was pretty much a letdown. For one, it makes a huge number of claims but does not back up these claims by any empirical evidence (even though I think it's mostly right, and that empirical evidence for some of their claims exists). Two, I feel like an undergraduate software course covers 75% of the material in the book (at least mine did). Maybe people have learned since it was first published, or maybe I've just worked on pretty good teams that practiced the stuff, but nothing in there was ground breaking or made me a better developer. Three, there was a lot of filler in the book, summaries, talking about future, and past chapters, etc that added no value except to inflate the page count. I feel like Pragmatic Programmer would be a good book to read before starting your first job, or maybe your undergraduate year of college. I was going to start Code Complete next, but Pragmatic Programmer was so disappointing I decided to read fiction for the next few weeks instead. So to answer your question, the best language agnostic development books I've read are: 1. Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity 2. The Best Software Writing I 3. Hackers and Painters I always wish Joel would come out with a second volume of #2, or to start his blog up again. I've yet to find something that equals his quality since he stopped writing.

gruseom 13y ago
it makes a huge number of claims but does not back up these claims by any empirical evidence Name a book that does! The corpus of evidence in our field is quite weak and doesn't support almost any interesting claim you might make about it. For example, there's no empirical data supporting version control [1]. There are books that purport to derive software development lessons from the research literature, but they're either not very good (because they rely on crappy studies and/or go beyond what the studies support) or not very interesting (because they merely transcribe the results of very narrow studies). An anthology of the literature was published recently [2], and it falls in the latter category. I bought it to get the state of the art in empirical research and found it contained almost nothing of use to me as a practitioner. Many of the studies were shoddy (e.g. qualitative case histories--a euphemism for "anecdote") and the better ones are so careful to limit themselves to the tiny experiments they did that you can't derive anything from them. I could mention a couple of exceptions, though, if anyone's interested. I think the root problem is that software development is complicated, so to do rigorous formal studies on it is expensive. The amount of funding available for this work is a drop in the bucket of what it would need to be. In short, the market value of empirical evidence on software development isn't high enough for anyone to pay for it. [1] http://neverworkintheory.org/2012/12/12/empirical-evidence-for-the-value-of-version-control.html http://neverworkintheory.org/2012/12/12/empirical-evidence-f.... and http://neverworkintheory.org/2012/12/30/why-we-need-evidence.html http://neverworkintheory.org/2012/12/30/why-we-need-evidence.... Notice that the HN discussion of the first post completely failed to answer its question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4931251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4931251. [2] http://www.amazon.com/Making-Software-Really-Works-Believe/dp/0596808321 http://www.amazon.com/Making-Software-Really-Works-Believe/d...

by iends 13y ago

gruseom 13y ago

it makes a huge number of claims but does not back up these claims by any empirical evidence Name a book that does! The corpus of evidence in our field is quite weak and doesn't support almost any interesting claim you might make about it. For example, there's no empirical data supporting version control [1]. There are books that purport to derive software development lessons from the research literature, but they're either not very good (because they rely on crappy studies and/or go beyond what the studies support) or not very interesting (because they merely transcribe the results of very narrow studies). An anthology of the literature was published recently [2], and it falls in the latter category. I bought it to get the state of the art in empirical research and found it contained almost nothing of use to me as a practitioner. Many of the studies were shoddy (e.g. qualitative case histories--a euphemism for "anecdote") and the better ones are so careful to limit themselves to the tiny experiments they did that you can't derive anything from them. I could mention a couple of exceptions, though, if anyone's interested. I think the root problem is that software development is complicated, so to do rigorous formal studies on it is expensive. The amount of funding available for this work is a drop in the bucket of what it would need to be. In short, the market value of empirical evidence on software development isn't high enough for anyone to pay for it. [1] http://neverworkintheory.org/2012/12/12/empirical-evidence-for-the-value-of-version-control.html http://neverworkintheory.org/2012/12/12/empirical-evidence-f.... and http://neverworkintheory.org/2012/12/30/why-we-need-evidence.html http://neverworkintheory.org/2012/12/30/why-we-need-evidence.... Notice that the HN discussion of the first post completely failed to answer its question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4931251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4931251. [2] http://www.amazon.com/Making-Software-Really-Works-Believe/dp/0596808321 http://www.amazon.com/Making-Software-Really-Works-Believe/d...