Book Review: The passionate programmer
My day job isn’t really challenging, at least not as challenging as I want it to be. I always thought to myself that after college my first dev job would be so intimidating, I would need to work long hours, squeeze every brain power I have, and learn so much since I’m in a large corporation.
However, I find myself really finding things to do to fill the blank time I have, and have to just keep looking for ways to help myself grow other than things I do and learning from others aroud me.
This book really grabbed my attention when I was looking at what books have been released from the pragmatic bookshelf. After I read the sample chapter “Be the worst”, which tells you to always be the worst in your team as that’s how you grow, it resonates with my heart big time.
I got it from our library, and started reading it, and find it to be really relevant to me, since the author used to be an jazz musician (I love jazz guitar), and he relates software development with developing jazz music skills perfectly.
From how/what to invest in your skills, how to position and look at your environment, to how to execute in software development, it really gives a good wake up call for what I’m doing and how I should be leveraging my time in developing my career.
What I love about this book, is the various real stories that different great engineers share, and how they’ve learned.
Another thing I love as well, is the action items in the back of each story to help you not just know somthing but know how to do it.
The only bad part I guess for this book is that, there are so many action items to do since there are so many stories, and it’s quite overwhelming after reading the whole book.
I guess I would have to pick and choose what I want, but all of them sounds really interesting, for example go to topcoder.com and practice algorithms sounds like something I should do enhance my problem solving skills.
Anyway, I really enjoy this book as it’s an easy read, but contains many gems that I would have to come back and read over again to keep them in my head.
I would recommend this book to any programmer who wants to be better, especially if you’re very beginning of your career.
