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A review by rodhilton
97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts by
2.0
"97 Livejournal Posts: Collective Suggestions from 20 Experts You've Heard Of And 77 Random People"
This is a book with 97 tips for programmers, each tip takes up two pages or less, written by different programmers (a few get more than one entry). Here's the problem: 2 pages isn't enough to say anything useful about anything. And taking 97 useless writings and concatenating them together doesn't create a useful one - the size limit of each entry prevents anything from being particularly valuable.
Sure, there are some gems occasionally, but it's mostly the same old stuff everyone knows (write unit tests, learn commandline tools, write good comments, write no comments, refactor, DRY, SRP, etc) and a handful of random crap (learn a foreign language). Hilariously, there are occasional serious computer scientists thrown into the mix - one post goes into a lot of detail about how floating point rounding errors happen, including formulas and mathematics, and his tip is sandwiched between a tip on encapsulating behavior with state and one on contributing to open source (as a side note, I am getting kind of tired of the attitude that open source projects are a great dumping ground for practicing your programming skills, rather than real projects worthy of the same kind of care and consideration as your day job).
"Install Me" wins the award for being the whiniest, most annoying post in the entire pack, it should be mentioned specifically.
In any case, most of these posts are a lot of "trust me" or "based on my experience" - no claims have any real evidence, and no tutorials or suggestions contain useful examples - how could they, with only two pages to work with? Every one of these suggestions should be the central thesis of its own book that goes into greater depth, and collecting 97 book descriptions together does not make a new book.
Here's a good rule of thumb: if you are a writer contributing to a book, and someone asked you to do a 90-minute presentation on your material, could you do it? How about a 60 minute presentation? 30? A 5-minute lightning talk, at least? If your entire contribution can be covered in an elevator ride, it's not worthy of a book.
There are probably 10-15 pages worth of good stuff in here, but even that isn't really very good. Not recommended.
This is a book with 97 tips for programmers, each tip takes up two pages or less, written by different programmers (a few get more than one entry). Here's the problem: 2 pages isn't enough to say anything useful about anything. And taking 97 useless writings and concatenating them together doesn't create a useful one - the size limit of each entry prevents anything from being particularly valuable.
Sure, there are some gems occasionally, but it's mostly the same old stuff everyone knows (write unit tests, learn commandline tools, write good comments, write no comments, refactor, DRY, SRP, etc) and a handful of random crap (learn a foreign language). Hilariously, there are occasional serious computer scientists thrown into the mix - one post goes into a lot of detail about how floating point rounding errors happen, including formulas and mathematics, and his tip is sandwiched between a tip on encapsulating behavior with state and one on contributing to open source (as a side note, I am getting kind of tired of the attitude that open source projects are a great dumping ground for practicing your programming skills, rather than real projects worthy of the same kind of care and consideration as your day job).
"Install Me" wins the award for being the whiniest, most annoying post in the entire pack, it should be mentioned specifically.
In any case, most of these posts are a lot of "trust me" or "based on my experience" - no claims have any real evidence, and no tutorials or suggestions contain useful examples - how could they, with only two pages to work with? Every one of these suggestions should be the central thesis of its own book that goes into greater depth, and collecting 97 book descriptions together does not make a new book.
Here's a good rule of thumb: if you are a writer contributing to a book, and someone asked you to do a 90-minute presentation on your material, could you do it? How about a 60 minute presentation? 30? A 5-minute lightning talk, at least? If your entire contribution can be covered in an elevator ride, it's not worthy of a book.
There are probably 10-15 pages worth of good stuff in here, but even that isn't really very good. Not recommended.