The Productive Programmer - cover

Author: Neal Ford
Publisher: O’Reilly
Published: 2008
Pages: 206

The first half of the book covers the technical aspect of productivity. It’s not programming productivity specifically, just productivity. The advice is somewhat generic; examples covered include reducing distractions, creating blocks of time for working quietly, automation, and using multiple clipboards. Good advice, to be sure, but mostly things I knew already. The suggestions on automation were helpful.

The second half is about programming productively, how to write and manage code in an efficient manner. Topics covered include Test-Driven Development, static code analysis, and programming patterns. There’s some emphasis put on using the right tools, which is of course critical to programming productivity. Like the previous section, nothing really new here.

The book is not linear; the chapters can be read in any order. None have any relation with others. Each chapter is essentially an essay on a particular topic related to programmer productivity. The result is a disjointed reading experience, and in hindsight seems like a grab bag of tips and tricks. Not to say that is bad, but not very cohesive.

Given the book’s diverse contents, I would have liked a 1-2 page summary of the concepts, practices, and techniques discussed throughout. A summary list of productivity tips would have been useful as a quick reference.

The writing is concise and clear. I didn’t have any difficulty reading the author’s prose.

There is a website for the book, running on MediaWiki. The author suggests using the site to share ideas on productivity, but there seems to have been little activity in that regard. Unfortunately, the site has more spam on it than real content.

The bottom line: this is an interesting book in that it rounds up a number of techniques and practices, but it doesn’t spend a lot of time on any of them. It’s broad but has little depth. Additionally, all the information presented can be found elsewhere. It may be worthwhile for a junior programmer to give this book a read, but anyone beyond that point likely won’t get anything out of it. On the flip side, it could be worthwhile to review now and again, just to make sure you’re doing all the right things.