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The Productive Programmer

Posted by: Venkat Subramaniam on 07/10/2008

I have been waiting for this book since I saw my friend Neal Ford give a talk on being a Productive Programmer. Now, I have it in my hands.

Many of us strive to be a craftsman—we don't simply want to get by; we want to do what we do at its best. For most people I interact with, that is developing software, working with computers, and languages and frameworks.

There are two things we need to focus on—How we do things, and What we do.

How can you get better at working with your computers? Neal answers this question in the first part—Mechanics—of the book. He shows us how to improve the hows when we interact with the computers and write software.

In the second part of the book—Practice—he shows what practices we can follow to improve our ability to succeed as programmers.

There are several gems in the book. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and his examples are so darn good that I already stole (with acknowledgment) some examples from this book in my classes.

Venkat Subramaniam's complete blog can be found at: http://blog.agiledeveloper.com/

About Venkat Subramaniam

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects, and speaks frequently at international conferences and user groups. Venkat is also an adjunct faculty and teaches CS courses remotely at the University of Houston. He is author of ".NET Gotchas," coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning "Practices of an Agile Developer," author of "Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer" and "Programming Scala: Tackle Multi-Core Complexity on the Java Virtual Machine" (Pragmatic Bookshelf).

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