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The Pragmatic Programmer: is it worth reading?
Practical craft advice spanning the whole of software work, including a consistently sound position on testing.
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- published
- 2019
- key ideas
- 3
- reading path
- 1
The Pragmatic Programmer
Your Journey to Mastery
by David Thomas, Andrew Hunt
- Publisher
- Addison-Wesley
- Year
- 2019
- Edition
- Twentieth anniversary edition, substantially revised from the 1999 original.
- ISBN
- 9780135957059
Useful when you are: New to testing, Practising tester, Senior / lead
Verdict
Should you read it?
Read it if
You are early in a software career, in any role. It is the broadest useful book on this list and the one with the widest applicability.
Skip it if
You have fifteen years of experience and have absorbed this material from the industry already, which most people have without reading it.
The argument
What it argues
A collection of practical principles rather than a methodology: do not repeat yourself, design by contract, assertive programming, tracer bullets, and a general stance of deliberate, reflective practice.
Testing runs throughout rather than being confined to a chapter. The position is that tests are the first user of your code and that code which is hard to test is badly designed, which is the same insight TDD arrives at from a different direction.
The anniversary edition updates the examples and removes the material that had dated, making it a genuinely current book rather than a historical one.
Key ideas
Ideas worth taking from it
- 01
DRY, properly understood
About duplicated knowledge rather than duplicated text. Widely misquoted as a prohibition on similar-looking code, which leads to worse abstractions.
- 02
Tests are the first user of your code
If code is hard to test, the design is the problem. A reframing that makes testability a design concern rather than a testing concern.
- 03
Tracer bullets
Build a thin end-to-end path early to validate the architecture, then thicken it. Closely related to the walking skeleton idea.
Criticism
What has dated, and what it gets wrong
Breadth over depth by design, so no topic is covered deeply enough to act on without further reading. Some advice is sufficiently general to be hard to disagree with and equally hard to apply. The anniversary edition fixed the dating problem the original had developed.
Reading paths
On our reading paths
Your first year in testing
Book 4 of 4 · New to testing
Testers increasingly work in code. This builds the engineering habits, such as automating the boring parts and owning your tools, that make that move easier.
1. Explore It!
2. Lessons Learned in Software Testing
3. Agile Testing- 4. The Pragmatic Programmer (this book)
Keep reading
What to read next
Reading about quality is cheaper than learning it in production.
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