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Title: Code Complete by Steve McConnell ISBN: 1-55615-484-4 Publisher: Microsoft Press Pub. Date: 14 May, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.63 (133 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Still standing after all these years!
Comment: Considering the rapid-fire replacement/evolution of languages, versions, porgamming models, project management and design etc., it is good to see some of the most basic and direct things don't change.
Steve McConnell brings a wonderful, down-to-earth sensibility to a topic that is still not written about very often: software construction, aka building your code. I have to believe it's because he got it right the first time.
The tone is conversational, understandable and clear. The examples are presented in multiple languages, showing some differences between each, the pros/cons of one over another without becoming preachy but while still providing an approach for either that meets the objectives of the topic.
The beginner and the intermediate programmer need this book to get their coding skills up to speed quickly. The experienced programmer needs it handy to loan to the latest newbie and to refine a few bad habits with these well-defined reasons to change them. Project managers might want to look at large portions of this book if they want to try and understand why programmers become frustrated with their requirements, or lack thereof. Managers who have never been coders themselves would read it to begin to understand just what their developers are doing, why they ask the questions that they do, what their biggest roadblocks can be and why we become frustrated with unbridled & unchecked changes & feature creeps. It presents a good case for developing a flexible coding standard.
These days we have so much information coming at us on related but unique topics and are constantly trying to absorb new things that it is comforting to know that plain, old common sense survives. All in all, one of the best software books I have read, and that it is still in print and still of value cannot be overlooked. Having some of the best practices laid out for you makes it easier to remember them. Code well.
Rating: 5
Summary: Lives up to its name and fame
Comment: This book is a very helpful and informative guide to software construction. It covers anything from identation to psychology, routine construction to project planning and management, and proves useful regardless of your experience level, or the language you program in.
Even if some of its contents feel a little aged (I think that we can safely discard discussion of Fortran, for example, and syntax-coloring alleviates code layout problems in most modern environments) at least 95% of the contents are still pretty valuable.
The concepts and guidelines teached in this book are useful because they cover things that will probably be with us for years to come. For example, even if OO is not covered in deep, the concept of proper encapsulation and modular design are a recurring theme, and can easily map to OO development. The book is well organized and full of examples, hard data and checklists which will help you improve your general coding practices.
Don't think that this book is targeted to novices or amateur programmers (even if they will find it useful, too): expert coders have probably already discovered many of the principles by themselves, and a lot of the concepts are available in other books (like The Pragmatic Programmer, for example) but this does not detract from the value of this book.
Also don't be intimitated by the size of the book: the style is easy to follow, with plenty of examples, typographic highlights to stress various points, good use of images and diagrams, and lots of recaps, checklists and cross indexing among the various sections. You may read it from cover to cover and then use it as a reference by zooming to the appropriate chapter or section.
I think that this book may be considered a true classic, along with the works of Knuth or Bentley: a new edition could just update the bibliographic resources and perhaps freshen up some of the statistics (most of the points made by the author are backed by hard data and research, a valuable tool in teaching or advocating methodologies or design practices) and let the rest of the contents remain unchanged.
Even in its present edition, I think it fully deserves its 5 stars... in a sense, it deserves them even more, considering how well it stands the test of time in our fast-changing line of work.
Rating: 4
Summary: Recommendation
Comment: I am not jet finished reading this book, so maybe later I shall have some additional comments. The book is very old (copyright 1993), but it is valuable asset for professional programmer.
This book is the best example of the rule "the more you know the better is your benefit of reading a book". For example, although book does not deal with object oriented programming (as far as I read till now), even if you are professinal programmer who is in object programming you will get something that you very probably missed - a lot of important and fine details that will help you be a better programmer in object world. It is very hard to explain the profit you get with this book, but it is: you get your knowledge of coding polished to the maximum.
To return to the example of OOP (object oriented programming) this book will tell you about the cohesion of your methods (the book calls them traditional names, routines) and sorts of coupling; everything is the pure ground for OOP but from the perspective of traditional programming; even in OOP books you cannot find easily such explanations, and that done in traditional programming.
If you are a beginner, this book will show you how to name the routines and variables, will show you that statistically short routines of say 20 lines are more prone to errors per line of code than routines of 100 lines! Anyway, I do not want to spoil the pleasure of reading the book: don't expect too much from it, but if you are a brilliant programmer who appreciate precision and polishing of your knowledge, you will be on a right track if you choose this book.
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Title: Rapid Development by Steve McConnell ISBN: 1556159005 Publisher: Microsoft Press Pub. Date: 02 July, 1996 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt, David Thomas ISBN: 020161622X Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 20 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $39.99 |
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Title: Software Project Survival Guide by Steve C McConnell ISBN: 1572316217 Publisher: Microsoft Press Pub. Date: 14 November, 1997 List Price(USD): $24.99 |
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Title: The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition) by Frederick P. Brooks ISBN: 0201835959 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 02 August, 1995 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Design Patterns by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides ISBN: 0201633612 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 15 January, 1995 List Price(USD): $54.99 |
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