The Productive Programmer

Foreword

David Bock

Principal Consultant
CodeSherpas

The individual productivity of programmers varies widely in our industry. What most of us might be able to get done in a week, some are able to get done in a day. Why is that? The short answer concerns mastery of the tools developers have at their disposal. The long answer is about the real awareness of the tools’ capabilities and mastery of the thought process for using them. The truth lies somewhere between a methodology and a philosophy, and that is what Neal captures in this book.

The seeds of this book were planted in the fall of 2005, on a ride back to the airport. Neal asked me, “Do you think the world needs another book on regular expressions?” From there, the conversation turned to topics of books we wished existed. I thought back to a point in my career where I feel I made the leap from merely good to very productive, and how and why that happened. I said, “I don’t know what the title of the book is, but the subtitle would be ‘using the command line as an integrated development environment.’” At the time I credited my increased productivity to the acceleration I experienced using the bash shell, but it was more than that—it was my increasing familiarity with that tool as I stopped having to struggle to do things and could just get them done. We spent some time discussing that hyperproductivity and how to bottle it. Several years, untold conversations, and a series of lectures later, Neal has produced a definitive work on the subject.

In his book Programming Perl (O’Reilly), Larry Wall describes the three virtues of a programmer as “laziness, impatience, and hubris.” Laziness, because you will expend effort to reduce the amount of overall work necessary. Impatience, because it will anger you if you are wasting time doing something the computer could do faster for you. And hubris, because excessive pride will make you write programs that other people won’t say bad things about. This book doesn’t use any of those words (and I used grep to check), but as you read on, you will find this sentiment echoed and expanded in this content.

There are several books that have had a great influence on my career, changing the way I see the world. I wish I had this book in hand 10 years ago; I’m sure it will have a profound influence on those who read it.