The Productive Programmer

By Neal Ford
July 2008
Pages: 222
Series: Theory In Practice
ISBN 10: 0-596-51978-8 | ISBN 13: 9780596519780
Press Release
(4) (Average of 2 Customer Reviews)

Description

Anyone who develops software for a living needs a proven way to produce it better, faster, and cheaper. The Productive Programmer offers critical timesaving and productivity tools that you can adopt right away, no matter what platform you use. Master developer Neal Ford details ten valuable practices that will help you elude common traps, improve your code, and become more valuable to your team.
Full Description

Anyone who develops software for a living needs a proven way to produce it better, faster, and cheaper. The Productive Programmer offers critical timesaving and productivity tools that you can adopt right away, no matter what platform you use. Master developer Neal Ford not only offers advice on the mechanics of productivity-how to work smarter, spurn interruptions, get the most out your computer, and avoid repetition-he also details valuable practices that will help you elude common traps, improve your code, and become more valuable to your team. You'll learn to:

Write the test before you write the code
Manage the lifecycle of your objects fastidiously
Build only what you need now, not what you might need later
Apply ancient philosophies to software development
Question authority, rather than blindly adhere to standards
Make hard things easier and impossible things possible through meta-programming
Be sure all code within a method is at the same level of abstraction
Pick the right editor and assemble the best tools for the job

This isn't theory, but the fruits of Ford's real-world experience as an Application Architect at the global IT consultancy ThoughtWorks. Whether you're a beginner or a pro with years of experience, you'll improve your work and your career with the simple and straightforward principles in The Productive Programmer.

Featured customer reviews

Review of The Productive Programmer, October 01 2008

Rating:

Submitted by Paul de Raaij [Respond | View]

A great book for the developer who realizes that he can work much faster and better with some neat and handy tricks.

Neal Ford shows in The Productive Programmer not only some tricks and programs how to work much faster, but gives you the right directions how to notice where you can make your optimalizations to speed up things and thus working much more productively.

Neal shows the reader that programmers easily forget where computers are for. Executing actions over and over again. Is isn't the computer that does those repetitive actions, but the developer himself.

Therefore it's a great book for the GUI developers among us who want to speed up things and aren't afraid of the command-line.

The way Neal writes this book is a very attractive with a lot of anecdotes and a direct way of talking to the reader.

A book worth it's money.

The Productive Programmer rocks!, August 21 2008

Rating:

Submitted by Burk Hufnagel [Respond | View]

Disclaimer: As a book reviewer for the Atlanta Java User's Group, I
received a free copy of this book. The truth is that I'd been waiting
to buy a copy since Neal mentioned he was working on it at a
developer's conference last year. I just got lucky snagging a review
copy.

The Productive Programmer is a book for those of us who willingly
spend our lives creating software. We know that some of our skills and
knowledge are constantly becoming irrelevant so we strive to keep
learning new things, and new ways of doing things, in the hope that
we'll stay ahead of (or at least not fall too far behind) the curve.

This book won't help with those skills; at least not directly. But it
will help you build the kind of foundational skills and ways of
thinking that make it easier to learn about the new and flashy things
because you're not wasting time in other areas.

The Productive Programmer is about maximizing your ability to
efficiently create good, working software. It's about leveraging your
computer's abilities, and learning how to master the tools you use
regularly. If you love being a developer and creating software then
you owe it to yourself to read this book and start becoming better at
it today. The information Neal shares in this book is worth twice the
price to anyone who creates software for a living.

The conversational tone makes it easy to read the whole thing quickly,
but the information density will have you referring back to it time
and again looking for a tool, or tip, that applies to what you're
currently working on.

The only complaint I have is pretty mild. A tear-out card with the
keyboard short-cuts would probably help people learn to use them
faster. Sure, we could make our own (and I am) but it does seem a
little inefficient to make us comb through the book to find them all.
*grin*

Thanks, Neal. It was well worth the wait. This book rocks!

Burk Hufnagel
Lead Software Architect
SCJP, SCJD, SCEA 5

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Media reviews
"The Productive Programmer is about maximizing your ability to efficiently create good, working software. It's about leveraging your computer's abilities, and learning how to master the tools you use regularly. If you love being a developer and creating software then you owe it to yourself to read this book and start becoming better at it today."
-- Burk Hufnagel, Developer Zone, IT Book Zone

"Here's another 'foundation pick' for serious programming collections: a guide that tells how to save time and enhance productivity with tools which can be adopted over many platforms and styles. "
-- Diane C. Donovan, California Bookwatch: The Computer Shelf

"...I think that most programmers would benefit from owning and reading Neal Ford’s book. He does a good job of leveraging both his programming and training background in producing a sleek, streamlined guide that will help you automate tasks and pump up your code."
-- James Pyles, Linux Pro Magazine

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"The Productive Programmer is about maximizing your ability to efficiently create good, working software. It's about leveraging your computer's abilities, and learning how to master the tools you use regularly."
--Burk Hufnagel, Developer Zone, IT Book Zone