Customer Reviews

The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development

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This book is very easy to pick up (short chapters make it easy to pop in and out of reading it), and the author tells a series of interesting stories to explain his points. This book provides a number of ideas on how to improve your career and thoroughly enjoy your job. While the book is targetted to Software Programmers, this book is accessible anyone in a related field (Business Analysts, System Admins, DBAs, IT staff, etc). This book is a bit hard to put down, I read it cover to cover in about a week.

"The Passionate Programmer" (ISBN: 978-1-934356-34-0) was written by Chad Fowler. According to the back cover the book is a revised edition of "My Job Went to India: 52 Ways to Save Your Job." Surprisingly, I didn't really find anything in the book regarding jobs being outsourced. Chad has included a collection of informative exercises titled "Act on it" at the end of each chapter which generally have lengths under five pages.

I haven't programmed professionally very long ( < 4 years), still there are so many things that just make sense found in the book. Throughout The Passionate Programmer, Chad's underlying theme is we should always be working with better programmers, choose the places we work carefully, carefully choose associates because they have such a strong influence on the quality and passion you have while at work. Currently, I feel that i am stagnating because of a situation similar to what Chad discusses in the book: many of my coworkers are very negative, and the other programmer is extremely careful how much of the code he documents / shares so that he has built in job security.

Feeling irreplaceable or creating your own job security as Chad discusses really means that you are probably performing tasks in a way that others can't do them and that doesn't necessarily mean you as a software developer are a genius. Unmaintainable code really does end up painting your back with a bright red bulls eye because you are likely not a very good team player, and probably it would prevent you from moving up the hierarchy into a better job.

My favourite chapter of the book is titled "Learn to Love Maintenance" and this is because Chad has shown a different perspective. Chad encourages the reader to use the time doing maintenance to interact directly with customers, create a large base of advocates, and to use it as a time to truly learn the inner workings of the business because business rules are so heavily encoded in important software.

Overall, I would say that "The Passionate Programmer" is an excellent read and that I feel I have learned more about myself than I would have ever thought. I would never say that it is the next Code Complete or Code Craft, but it can definitely help you develop a meaningful career.

This book reads fast. Its divided in Five sections and each section consist of a series of very short chapters that, most of the time, are no more than two or three pages .

I found that I'm doing a lot of the things that Chad recommends and I identify myself with some of the situations he mentions in the book. I particularly enjoyed the section about marketing yourself something I'm not good at doing.

There are a few chapters that I market down to re-read later on, not because they are so deep that need a re-write (the writing is very accesible without been dull), but mostly because are the ones that talk to my weakness and the stuff that I need to remind myself to work on to improve.

Sparkled along the book there are easies from some renowned programmers on how they build their careers. They make for an enjoyable and fun read, and provide a break from the more 'to the point' writing that Chad uses.

All in all a very enjoyable no technical book, that can provide some help on achieving exactly what the tag line for the book is 'creating a remarkable career in software development'.

Starts off fluffy for a few chapters but rapidly gets into concrete and very useful advice.

A must-read for anyone in the IT field regardless of experience.

An excellent book that can help you bring back the love of code, with some excellent tips on a dazzling career in software. Originally, I flipped through this book at a local store, and after reading the introduction alone, I started on a 2 year process to reinvent my career in software. It was after I put this in motion that I actually bought and read the entire book, which is still one of my favorites today. It's a quick weekend read and has some excellent perspective on generalist vs. specialist, mentorship, and more. Read it, then give it as a gift to anyone in software that needs a good kick in the pants to bring their career to the next level!