Code Craft: The Practice of Writing Excellent Code [Paperback]

After reading the good, despite few, amazon reviews of this book i decided to pick it up. I'm a big fan of books that teach one how to become a better programmer. Unfortunately, i wasn't too impressed by this one. The author didn't seem to have anything super insightful or groundbreaking to share with us. He gave a description of what he considers to be good code/coders along with a really brief description of a lot of software related tools, paradigms, and 'types' of programmers.

Unfortunately he doesn't really say anything that hasn't been said. His code examples are notably poor. In Steve McConnels book, "Code Complete" he criticizes programming books for using fibonacci as an example of recursion. He criticizes it because it's not something that software developers find themselves doing often. I have the same complaint with most of the code examples in this book (so maybe it is good there are so few). It felt like my high school java teacher (who had neither a CS degree or programming experience) wrote up the code samples. You'll quickly be annoyed by the simplicity of the mistakes and concepts that he is trying to express.

As you read this book you'll find things you agree and disagree with, and you'll just want to say OK. you won't run to your computer wanting to implement them. You also won't run to your friends telling them you've found a new way to do something. I guess that is my major problem with this book, there's nothing really special about it. I also found myself wondering 'why is this important?' throughout the book quite a bit.

I found another thing in this book to be insulting, the Good Programmers Bad Programmers section after each chapter. If i didn't know the difference between a good programmer and a bad programmer i wouldn't have bought the book. They are all very similar and obvious.

I would definitely recommend the following books over it:

Code Complete

Refactoring

Pragmatic Programmer

while this book does cover some things these books say, not enough to replace any one of them, and reading any of these will provide insights this book cannot.

I was at the library and this happened to be next to another book that I wanted, so I picked it up too.

And wow, it's rare that I am this disappointed in a book. The content is very thin. It sounds like it was completely gathered from secondary sources, e.g. reading other books about software engineering. It doesn't sound like the result of actual experience.

Every page is filled with platitudes without any examples of real experience backing it up. I'll grant that he has assembled an extraordinarly wide range of *terms* and terminology. It looks like he has tried to shove 3 sentences about every topic in software into a single book. Unfortunately, this ultimately makes for a book with little use.

Another sticking point is the writing style. It comes off like the author is an annoying guy trying to be funny and trying to be your friend. The first sentence irritated me: "What's in it for me? Programming is your passion. It's sad, but it's true."

Huh? Why is it sad that programming is one's passion??? There are similar head-scratchers elsewhere in the book. He also devotes a section to talking about the various types of "code monkeys". And the last type is "You. In the interest of politeness, we'll say no more about this curious beast. Sadly, some people are beyond help..." What? The reader is beyond help? If I pretend for a minute that he's not insulting me, then I still don't know what he's trying to say. This book is incoherent.

And what's with all the reviews below that read like advertisements? Give me a break. It looks like a lot of the author's friends are spamming Amazon's reviews.

I recommend reading Joel Spolsky's books for real, specific insights on programming and the software development process, earned from experience, written in a much clearer and more entertaining style.

I'm also reading Jon Bentley's "Programming Pearls" now.

I have two comments.
First, do not expect technical details on this book. There isn't. Second, the only paragraph that is really good is on page 461 and it says: "Find the classic books of the field". This is not one of those. He recommends and I agree almost completely:
* Code Complete
* Design Patterns: Elements of reusable object-oriented software
* The mythical man-month
* The psychology of computer programming
* The practice of programming
* Peopleware
* The pragmatic programmer
* refactoring

I do not thing that "Code Craft" is one of those.