My impressions about 97 things that every programmers should know book

Yesterday I finished 97 things that every programmers should know book in the bathtub (hehe :) ). This is somehow a bit sad thing, because I really enjoyed to read ideas from experienced programmers and the thinking on how add these things to my daily routine.

IMHO this is not a one time read only book and I surely get it from the bookshelf in the future often just to pick a random chapter, because you can't memorize all useful thoughts after the first time. If I have to pick my current (surely changes in the future) top 5 chapters I would list these:

Chapter 82. Test While You Sleep (and over Weekends)

Since long time I felt my PC in the office is wasting the time and money when I'm away. I mean the developer machines are strong enough to help the daily automation with their extra capacity during the absence of their owners. When do my holiday leave, my machine can be switched off to do nothing, but why I can't offer it as a free resource like the Amazons on-demand instances to help my colleagues work with it's extra capacity? My dream is a so automated environment when we can handle ALL available machines in pools and offer them several roles based on their current status.

Chapter 36. The Guru Myth

An excellent chapter about the team play and learning. Not directly of course, but to me the message of this piece was to cooperate with my colleagues in more effective way and learn they method if I found it usefule, to steal their "brain" ;)

Chapter 72. Reinvent the Wheel Often

This chapter resonates with my feelings about to resharpen my development skills. Not enough to knowing where to find a good solution implementation for our problems, but we need to get our hands dirty with them to practice algorithms, problem solving and understand their benefits and setbacks to choose and|or deliver more efficient solution.

Chapter 93. Write Code As If You Had to Support It for the Rest of Your Life

I loved this chapter. Really. Sometimes I forced to do duct tape programming, but I never enjoyed and I really missed from the stakeholder side to give me time to clean up the mess I caused even if I gently asked or argued passionately. I feel I'm not so good in arguing for long term benefits when we successfully delivered, but at least I tried ;) Everyone who read about the Broken Window Theory will love this chapter as I loved :)

Chapter 88. The Unix Tools Are Your Friends

My *nix skills are minimal. Really. I know how to move/copy/delete files, how to start applications and how to stop/kill them and some fundamental scripting is in my skillset, but that's all. This essay convinced me to invest more effort to understand *nix world and don't depend on my IDE and Windows that is quite fragile environment especially when I need some advanced *nix knowledge in case of issues in prod environment (that is usually *nix based)

I can list dozens of chapters as my favorites, but this list surely changes in time as my priorities and knowledge changes, so I added this book to my yearly reads (Like the Clean Code book) to refresh my weakening memory :)