Is your first day at your new Corporation, you’re introduced to the company set of CORPORATE VALUES after a brief epistemological digression on the history of the world after the company was founded.
A pretty HR girl talks excited of how the company you’re joining is the best place to work on the whole planet and shows you the agenda of the next two induction days.
The room is crowded with more or less experienced people, everybody receive his personal ID and as the HR lady explained many times, needs to be used by each and everyone when entering whatever place in the corporation building, this is THE BADGE!
You forget to pass your badge in the reader when entering the building and the Corporate security officer will kick your ass reporting to your Solid Line Manager your offense, you’re now allowed two more minor felony before the Corporate law 24.5.12a/1992-delta2 will force your Solid Line Manager to take actions against you in order to save the CORPORATION VALUES!!! TATA TA TAAAAAA!! –At this point, you know you’re going to be SOLID for the next 5 years, corporate guys know what I mean–
In those two induction days your mother Corporation will provide you with some doctrine, a pen, the Corporate calendar, a quire and if you’re lucky a Corporate branded cup! The only thing your new mother-in-law will not provide you is with THE BOOK!!!
<cut the shit> I Normally approach with a certain degree of skepticism the kind of books promising to make you a better programmer, I believe nothing may really surrogate years of hard work, discipline and mistakes. But, this book is really good!
If you have enough quality experience in your curriculum you may not necessarily find in the pages of “The pragmatic programmer“ many illuminating arguments, but still you need to read the book in order to be sure your experience is worth something; You may very well discover that you’re a kind copy-paste-coder with 15 years of worthless experience.
From the other side if you’re new to the business then the book is a must have, the things you’ll learn will save your more experience team mates from being frustrated by your work during each and every code review, and will definitively make you a better engineer!
The book has a very pragmatic approach, is not a philosophy book nor a abstruse introduction to some fancy programming theory, if I have to tell what about is the book in few words then: It is just a set of advice’s and golden rules to apply in your everyday work! is the result of years of experience, of good practices.
Is quality-experience on paper!
The book contains the answer to some very real questions, which answers most of our colleagues do not understand:
- Shouldn’t we just copy this functionality from that other file?
- Why refactoring now? The code seems to work great!
- Can’t we just add one more IF to ComputationalManagerAndUIProcessorWithMagic(…)?
- Why should I fix it, it’s not my responsibility! It’s not my code!
- Test? We already submitted a couple of tests last year.. Again? Really?
- Why a new design? There seems to be a guy in the basement that understand what the actual code does!
- &c.
Folks, I’m really serious about this, buy the book and read it, even if you’re a quality senior it cost you nothing but time even if you have nothing to learn from it, eventually you may discover that you’re not alone when thinking that the things are not working correctly in your team.
The book should be given for free in each Company to everybody, and the outcome of the trial period should depend on the understanding of the book concepts.