Reviews for The Productive Programmer (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly))

1. pretty good

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, April 12rd, 2010

   Easy reading, the author is obviously an experienced hands-on programmer. The author makes good solid points and presents good down-to-earth tips for fixing pains you recognize. No academic stuff, just plain 'you need this shovel to dig that hole, not a spoon'. Which is perfect.
   
   You get a lot of "i knew this already"'s, but in general you pick up a few good tips here and there. It covers Linux, OSX and Windows - which obviously has it's share of overhead as you probably don't use all 3 OS'es. I found nothing magically super groundbreaking, but wasn't really expecting too either.
   
   Recommended.

2. Makes you think about your coding and work methods

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, February 12th, 2010

   This book is pretty interesting and an easy read. It's all about productivity - choosing and using the right tools, gains acheived by using the keyboard instead of the mouse, things to look for and excell at with editores and IDEs, and even coding principles to achieve cleaner and more reusable and testable code. The book is thin, so its not jammed with every single possible detail, making it quite light on the reading. You get the principles clearly presented and some examples to make the ideas even clearer.
   
   Most of the code is Java, but is easily read and understood by anyone who works with .Net (like me). There's also some dynamic language stuff in there. The code is very readable. Overall, and more important than the code, are the principals mentioned and the recomended methods, to help you make yourself more productive when programming.
   
   The book is worth reading and should probably be complemented by one of the Robert Martin series books like Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship (Robert C. Martin)or Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C# (Robert C. Martin).