The Productive Programmer by Neal Ford

Published by O'Reilly in July of 2008
List Price: $39.99; Pages: 222
ISBN 10: 0-596-51978-8 | ISBN 13: 978059651978

The Productive Programmer is a book for those of us who willingly spend our lives creating software. We know that some of our skills and knowledge are constantly becoming irrelevant so we strive to keep learning new things, and new ways of doing things, in the hope that we'll stay ahead of (or at least not fall too far behind) the curve.

This book won't help with those skills; at least not directly. But it will help you build the kind of foundational skills and ways of thinking that make it easier to learn about the new and flashy things because you're not wasting time in other areas.

The Productive Programmer is about maximizing your ability to efficiently create good, working software. It's about leveraging your computer's abilities, and learning how to master the tools you use regularly. If you love being a developer and creating software then you owe it to yourself to read this book and start becoming better at it today. If you're interested in more detail, I've posted a review in DZone's IT Book Zone, or ask me about it at next month's AJUG meeting.

Burk Hufnagel
Lead Software Architect
SCJP, SCJD, SCEA 5