97 Things Every Programmer Should Know - Kevlin Henney (Editor) ⭐️⭐️⭐️
I like books with these small tips for your daily basis work; you start using it without even realizing it, which is excellent, and this book is one of these.
“97 Things Every Programmer Should Know” is a book that each single “Thing” is written by a different author, and these authors are some very well known developers in the industry.
These are my favorites notes from this book:
Technical debt is like a loan: you benefit from it in the short term, but you have to pay interest on it until it is fully paid.
Chapter 1. Act with Prudence - Seb Rose
Well, we all have faced technical debt, but we should avoid it to the point that it starts getting hard to add new functionalities to the code or even refactor the code. It’s crucial to understand the right time for a system refactor, otherwise the code might become hard to support; in a way that even small changes can have a harmful impact. If this is already the case, you should consider refactoring it. The longer you leave it, the worse it gets.
Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depends on simplicity. - Plato
Chapter 5. Beauty Is in Simplicity - Jørn Ølmheim
People write software with people for people. It’s a people business.
Chapter 71. Read the Humanities - Keith Braithwaite
There are two ways of constructing a software design: one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
Chapter 81. Test Precisely and Concretely - Kevlin Henney
It’s always good to keep in mind that we write code for people to understand, and that comes with simplicity. I still like to think that if something is too complicated, there might be a more straightforward way to do it. It’s usually easier to make something complex than to make something simple.
Consider the best programmer you’ve ever met: at one point, that person knew less about software than you do now.
Chapter 36. The Guru Myth - Ryan Brush
It’s always possible to achieve more and to learn more, that’s one of the things that I like the most about technology: it is continuously changing and evolving, and so we should as well.
Summarising, this is a good book with some useful tips for good practices in Software Development that every programmer should know and it’s also an easy read.