"Coders at Work"

I know the development community at large has been pretty enamored with the recently released book "Coders at Work" by Peter Seibel and I'm pretty sure the tech team at EchoDitto is tired of hearing me go on about it. So now that I've finally finished it, I'll say my piece and move on.

I enjoy how the book progresses through different types of coding styles and rather than trying to find the holy grail, the developers explain what worked and what didn't work for each situation. I gained a lot of insight from the range of philosophies from Jamie Zawinski's "Shipping is the most important feature" to Donald Knuth who invented Literate Programming

Also interesting is to read just how much the industry has changed. Over forty years ago it was reasonable for a developer to know the whole system from the hardware to the OS to the application. Presently that would pretty much be impossible.

My only complaint is that there are a few long tangents about esoteric topics relating to really old computers. Overall though it is a fun read and is highly recommended for developers.