I've been on a bit of a non-fiction book bender recently.
After reading a number of the books on Coding Horror's Recommended Reading for Developers including:
The Mythical Man Month
Peopleware
The Pragmatic Programmer
as well as:
Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering
As well is the often referenced Godel Escher Bach,
All of which I've enjoyed, and found relevant to my work and software interests.
I thought, Code Complete 2 would be worth a look.
I can't believe how wrong I was.
After reading something as deep an complex as GEB on the train to and from work everyday, I figured I could read anything.
Again, I can't believe how wrong I was.
I've found it dull, obvious, pointless and most of all overly specific.
Maybe the book just isn't aimed at me. I've had a few years of full on develpopment in a number of OO languages, with pretty comprehensive testing layers.
I haven't been able to get passed the third chapter due to extreme bordem.
I would not recommend this book to experienced developers.
2009-12-21
Being a fanboy really does work
I've recently realised that I am a scala fanboy.
When people complain about some problem in their chosen language/framework, my first thought is, "in scala they've solved that problem with _ .".
When I was writing the above sentence, my first instinct is to use the underscore character _ to match whatever scala feature it was I was thinking of. ( _ is a scala idiom which matches anything)
During a "Design patterns" study group, my reaction when I start to understand a pattern is, "oh, that's how people get around not have scala_feature_x".
But it was when I started vocalising these thoughts, that I realised that I was a fanboy.
The suprising thing is:
it actually works.
People are actually listening to my constant "scala, scala scala".
There's at least 4 solid Java developers I know who are now interested enough to start playing around with the language.
I always thought that fanboys were people who just didn't understand that noone else cared about what they cared about, but it turns out that there are people out there listening to fanboy rants.
The other alternative is that I'm actually a scala 'evangelist', but I think you have to get paid for it to be called an evangelist.
anyway, read this:
http://www.codecommit.com/blog/scala/roundup-scala-for-java-refugees
and this excelent book:
http://www.artima.com/shop/programming_in_scala
I'll probably have to buy the t-shirt, AND the mug; but I'm not quite ready for the hat though:
http://www.scala-lang.org/shop
oh yeah, scala rocks!
Update:
While I was writing this, yet another of my Java Developer colleges showed interest in scala, and mentioned having to look at it further :)
When people complain about some problem in their chosen language/framework, my first thought is, "in scala they've solved that problem with _ .".
When I was writing the above sentence, my first instinct is to use the underscore character _ to match whatever scala feature it was I was thinking of. ( _ is a scala idiom which matches anything)
During a "Design patterns" study group, my reaction when I start to understand a pattern is, "oh, that's how people get around not have scala_feature_x".
But it was when I started vocalising these thoughts, that I realised that I was a fanboy.
The suprising thing is:
it actually works.
People are actually listening to my constant "scala, scala scala".
There's at least 4 solid Java developers I know who are now interested enough to start playing around with the language.
I always thought that fanboys were people who just didn't understand that noone else cared about what they cared about, but it turns out that there are people out there listening to fanboy rants.
The other alternative is that I'm actually a scala 'evangelist', but I think you have to get paid for it to be called an evangelist.
anyway, read this:
http://www.codecommit.com/blog/scala/roundup-scala-for-java-refugees
and this excelent book:
http://www.artima.com/shop/programming_in_scala
I'll probably have to buy the t-shirt, AND the mug; but I'm not quite ready for the hat though:
http://www.scala-lang.org/shop
oh yeah, scala rocks!
Update:
While I was writing this, yet another of my Java Developer colleges showed interest in scala, and mentioned having to look at it further :)
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