Tips of very varying quality

The book “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know” consists of 97 sections by different authors regarding frequently occurring questions in software development.

As an overview, the book is well-suited, but only as an initial introduction. Only very superficial information is conveyed. For example, anyone who doesn’t know what “refactoring” means will have to search online. A major blunder is that there are no references to further literature after each section. That is the first star deduction.

And there are also articles that are simply too trivial, giving advice like “avoid using goto statements” and “comments are not evil.” Truly trivial are “learn foreign languages” and “testers are your friends.”

I had to laugh out loud at the sentence “once you get the hang of SQL, writing database-centric applications is a joy.” Because SQL queries can, of course, become very complex and often have lousy performance without indices and materialized views. Furthermore, there is often a persistence framework between the object-oriented programming language and the database, which brings its own complexity.

And that was the second star deduction. The quality of the articles is very uneven. I would have preferred to read only 85 good tips, as a few were a waste of time.

The other articles, on the other hand, are good (except for the missing literature references) and I also found a few good tips.

Overall, therefore, only mediocre.

• Kevlin Henney
• 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know
• O’Reilly
• 2010

See also the review on Amazon