Book Read
The Pragmatic Programmer
The 20th-anniversary edition. Some chapters have dated; the ones about how to think have not.
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Four stars, not five, and the missing star is honest: a fifth of the book is advice the industry has since absorbed so completely that reading it now feels like being told to drink water. But the chapters on estimation, on tracer bullets, and on the cost of broken windows are still the best short statements of those ideas anywhere.
The “stone soup” essay alone has paid for the book several times over in consulting work — it is the correct playbook for improving an org nobody has given you permission to improve.
Read it when: early. This is the one to hand a first-year developer, which is exactly what I keep doing with my copy, which is why I no longer have one.
