Neither technology nor management books are new – we have reviewed loads of both types on the Tamoggemon Content Network over the years. O’Reilly’s “the productive programmer” wants to change the genre – can it stack up?
Neal Ford chose to subdivide the book into two parts. Part number one looks at various interesting tools which make your work easier. Think about things like virtual desktops, multiple clipboards and so on – even though the small things may not make too much of a difference at first glance, the long-term effects of a minute a day have been documented here in the past.
Part two looks at things which programmers can do to make their lives simpler. This is the part of the tome which I didn’t really like – very little of the information is applicable for C and C++ – most of it is for dynamic languages like Ruby, with an occasional comment about Java.
As usual for O’Reilly, the book is easy to read and has a decently high paper quality.
In the end, the book contains a lot of small yet interesting hints – but unfortunately does not leave me 100% satisfied. If you expected a huge performance increase, forget it – on the other hand, the current price of about 35$ is not that steep…
Related posts:
Content, RSS
Twitter