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Coders at Work |  | Author: Peter Seibel
Publisher: Apress
Category: Book
List Price: $29.99
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Rating:  44 reviews
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 632
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 1.3
ISBN: 1430219483
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.1
EAN: 9781430219484
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Product Description
Peter Seibel interviews 15 of the most interesting computer programmers alive today in Coders at Work, offering a brand-new companion volume to Apress’s highly acclaimed best-seller Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston. As the words “at work” suggest, Peter Seibel focuses on how his interviewees tackle the day-to-day work of programming, while revealing much more, like how they became great programmers, how they recognize programming talent in others, and what kinds of problems they find most interesting. Hundreds of people have suggested names of programmers to interview on the Coders at Work web site: www.codersatwork.com. The complete list was 284 names. Having digested everyone’s feedback, we selected 15 folks who’ve been kind enough to agree to be interviewed: - Frances Allen: Pioneer in optimizing compilers, first woman to win the Turing Award (2006) and first female IBM fellow
- Joe Armstrong: Inventor of Erlang
- Joshua Bloch: Author of the Java collections framework, now at Google
- Bernie Cosell: One of the main software guys behind the original ARPANET IMPs and a master debugger
- Douglas Crockford: JSON founder, JavaScript architect at Yahoo!
- L. Peter Deutsch: Author of Ghostscript, implementer of Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1
- Brendan Eich: Inventor of JavaScript, CTO of the Mozilla Corporation
- Brad Fitzpatrick: Writer of LiveJournal, OpenID, memcached, and Perlbal
- Dan Ingalls: Smalltalk implementor and designer
- Simon Peyton Jones: Coinventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler
- Donald Knuth: Author of The Art of Computer Programming and creator of TeX
- Peter Norvig: Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI
- Guy Steele: Coinventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five, currently working on Fortress
- Ken Thompson: Inventor of UNIX
- Jamie Zawinski: Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hacker
What you’ll learn How the best programmers in the world do their job Who is this book for? Programmers interested in the point of view of leaders in the field. Programmers looking for approaches that work for some of these outstanding programmers.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 44
 Entertaining and Inspiring September 17, 2009
Brian Carper (Oregon, USA)
59 out of 59 found this review helpful
If you are a person who cares at all about the art, craft, or science of software development, you will not be able to put this book down.
Seibel (a hacker-turned-writer himself) talked to some big names in our field. Topics covered include: How do you learn to be a programmer? How do you perfect your skills? How important is formal education? Which programming languages are good and which are terrible? What kinds of tools do great programmers use? (Which text editors? IDEs? Debuggers?) How do you reason about a program, bottom-up or top-down? What's the best way to collaborate with other coders? etc. etc.
As you might expect, the interviewees agree in some areas and wildly disagree in others, but there are insights aplenty. Some answers may surprise you, like how many of these coders shun formal debuggers and use mostly print statements, or how many of them shun IDEs for Emacs (or even pen-and-paper).
Aside from the broad questions, Seibel gets the interviewees to open up about what it was like to work on the projects they are famous for. These stories are engaging and entertaining. Any coder who has stayed up till 4AM squashing bugs will find kindred spirits in these books. And the stories are somehow inspiring, as you realize that even great programmers suffer through the same frustrations and ups and downs that all of the rest of us go through.
Those interviewed also share insights into what they think of our modern world of programming. Most agree that we live in complicated and troubled times as we battle layer upon layer of software complexity. This book has lessons to be learned from the very brief history of our field, and advice for the future ("Keep it simple!").
This book is deliciously buzzword-free and the programmers interviewed give their honest (sometimes brutally honest) opinions about what they love and what they hate.
The author and all of those interviewed share a passion for programming and it's hard not to be swept up into it. Very good book.
Better than expected September 16, 2009
Luke John Crook (Los Angeles, California)
42 out of 45 found this review helpful
Imagine a really good episode of "60 Minutes" dedicated to each programmer in this book. Well, this book is better.
The first questions asked of each interviewee serve to set the stage; "How did you get into programming". The detailed answers given allow the reader to relate to the interviewee as an individual. Did they fall into programming by accident as part of their existing job? Did they train to be a programmer? Did they start on a Lisp machine or an Atari 800?
From this initial introduction the author begins to dig deeper. These questions are not formulaic. The author does not rattle off the same 40 questions to each subject but has a deep understanding of the domain. Questions demand answers to problems or serve to highlight issues that the interviewee presents.
Ran into a problem? Was it a language problem? A design problem? A management or coworker problem? What issues lead up to the problem? Could anything have been done differently? Questions are asked on working conditions, languages, approaches to problem solving, influences from upper management, influences from other programmers, burn out, love for programming (do they still like it).
In the first interview in the book with Jamie Zawinski; we know his approach to software design, his approach to programming (top down/bottom up) his feelings on over-engineering, crunch-time, refactoring, how he knows when he is in over his head, his philosophy to coding in general "At the end of the day, ship the **** thing... You are not here to write code, you are here to ship products."
This is not a "Coders at work for Dummies". There is no appendix tallying up how many of the interviewee's prefer waterfall to agile, functional to imperative and there shouldn't be. Each interview requires thought and reflection from the reader.
I read until 3:30 am and then wrote this review. This is a good book.
Get to know your heroes September 18, 2009
Luke Gorrie
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
I wanted to write a review earlier, but when I reopened the book to refresh my memory I couldn't put it down again.
I've always felt that the best way to improve as a programmer is to figure out whose work you admire the most and try to learn from them. Find out how they think, the tools they use, the ideas they consider crucial, and who they look up to themselves. Also find out the popular ideas they think are junk and the gurus they think are charlatans. There's a lot of day-to-day wisdom you usually can't pick up without actually spending time with somebody.
Coders at Work is great because it makes me feel like I've just spent a weekend with each of these illustrious people. I've been thoroughly entertained, found out what they're like and who I relate to, learned a lot of history, and taken a lot of practical inspiration. Now I want to write code - important code!
Coders at Work: A Review September 16, 2009
TheDarkTrumpet (Iowa, USA)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
I wrote this originally on my web site, http:[...], but am reposting here as well:
About a year ago, I decided to ask a number of people what I should read, and what I should do to be a better programmer. Over the next year I spent a lot of time with these same people trying to learn how to be a better programmer. This book, Coders at Work, is one of those books which turns out to be one of the most helpful programmer-guides I've come across.
- Structure of the book:
At the start of each "chapter" (which is really an interview), there's a short description about who each individual is. From there the chapter continues with a basic "interview-style" format, where Peter asks a question, and the interviewee answers it. Usually there's a followup question to clarify the previous answer - which has both the positive and negative effects to say "Person A answered this way, person B answered this way" - so in other words, at times it's hard to say, for example, how Zanwinski's answer differed from Peyton's.
The first question asked is one very crucial for most people, though, which is more or less, "How did you get into this?"
- Topics Covered:
The topics covered is not specific to only coding - some of the topics include:
- How did one get into coding?
- What were some successful projects?
- What were some less-successful/failure projects and why?
- What type of education is useful (e.g. is a PhD useful?)
- What tools does one use and why?
- What does one enjoy about programming?
- How one works with others and the dynamic of that.
This book is *not* only about coding though! That's an important thing to recognize about this book - it's leaned a bit toward programmers in general, but these topics help to make a better programmer in general - not simply specific to just coding better.
Some of the topics discussed feels a little dated, with some technology that's being discussed well before I was born, but since many of these challenges exist as timeless and I see in my everyday life, they are still valuable to hear about.
- Likes:
The main thing I enjoyed about this book was the fact that it's extremely applicable to what I see each day. A perfect example was the very first chapter in talking with Zanwinski. In this chapter, he discusses the concept of "Worse is Better", and how the strive for perfection caused a company to fail. This very concept rings extremely clear to me, in I've seen a system that was developed in the "Worse is Better" philosophy, and the development of the current system has seen times where the "Right Way" caused huge delays in the development of the system. It was a breath of fresh air to hear someone else discuss a situation that was really close to one that I've been, and in some ways continue to be, in. This is the main thing that I feel I enjoyed about the book itself.
Another applicable thing I read was the reasons for getting a PhD - which I've been contemplating for well over a year now. To hear perspectives about the reasoning to get or avoid one helps a lot in the contemplation.
Along with that, the topics were very interesting - and many of the answers were very clear and to the point. One can tell that these words were exactly the way the person said it - and not edited. This is a great feature because it feels more like a dialog than just a story-telling session.
- Dislikes:
There are a few areas of the book that I feel could have been done a bit better.
- When describing more old technology (e.g. the computer that Peyton learned on), I felt I had no clue what this device looked like or anything. A quick google can help in a lot of these situations, but there's a certain disconnect from the book itself as one's reading. This can happen especially for younger developers who haven't heard of some of this technology.
- The rants on some of the languages (e.g. Perl) can be taken poorly by some. I found it kinda funny, and it's clear that it's the individual's opinion, but I can see some people being annoyed by that. There's not a lot that can be done about this besides cutting out content.
- Better identifying similar crucial questions that are asked to each individual would be helpful to hear the ideals that are different between each person. Those, with a special icon or something, would have been very helpful for comparing and contrasting differences.
- Summary:
Overall, I feel this book is quite good, a definite 4.5/5 stars. This book gives a "mentor feeling", when I honestly don't have a mentor at this point at my job. I found that many of the questions in this book provided insights into the difficulties I'm currently presented with, and offers suggestions on how to approach them. While this book will likely not be the totally definitive guide for all programming-related knowledge, it's definitely something I feel fits in a niche that currently isn't occupied by other books. I feel this will benefit all levels of programmers.
Rare look at the culture that creates great code September 21, 2009
Peter Christensen (Aurora, IL)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
There are three kinds of books about any technical subject. The first teach you the methods - how do you do X or Y - this are the Learn Z in 24 hours books. Second are the conventions books that teach best practices, lessons learned, etc. There are fewer of these because they can be applied in a variety of situations and they tend to be classics - SICP, the Cormen algorithms book, TAOCP, etc.
Coders at Work is a premier example of the third type, the books that teach you the culture of a subject. What drives the people that create the tools, inventions, and techniques that everyone else learns? The 15 long interviews with legends and legends-to-be of computing give a look into the minds that produced the world that coders live in today. This book could be read and reread, studied, analyzed, and cross referenced to mine out all of its great lessons.
I'd write more but I'm anxious to reread it.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 44
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