The Pragmatic Programmer

This book by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt covers both technical and practical advice to new programmers to help them hone their craft.

My favourite chapter of the book was on A Pragmatic Approach which covers the importance of good design and what what it means. We should adapt to the context and the people that we are working with, instead of blindly following concepts or principles. Simply by following the Easier to Change principle as a value, we can make better decisions when designing a system. The section on Tracer Bullets shows how we can write code to validate and verify assumptions or concerns as to how code should behave. It helps new features or projects progress faster and provides the ability to demonstrate progress to stakeholders.

The authors also cover how we should have a healthy amount of Pragmatic Paranoia because we can never write perfect software. We have all made mistakes in the past in our code, causing incidents that inconveniences others. We should take defensive measures to prevent these mistakes from happening, we should not trust anyone, including ourselves.

The book is also littered with tips, such as Finish What You Start, to always deallocate resources when you allocate them. Your code shown always clean up after itself whenever possible. Important principles such as Principle of Least Privileged are discussed to make good design decisions.

The book ends with the responsibility of a programmer to ask whether we are doing the right thing - to protect the user and would you use this yourself. We should always be learning and improving ourselves, to be a better programmer.