Book review, Code Simplicity
One of the things that I have been telling myself all this time is “hey Cristian, you enjoyed or dislike that book, you should write a review or something”. Well, let’s try today with one of the latest book I read.
Today I finished reading Code Simplicity, by Max Kanat-Alexander and published in 2012 by O’Reilly. It was one of those books that was in my ebook reader and while in a one of those awful long flights I decided to read something not as technical as usual and give it a try. It is a short book, 84 pages, so it should not take you long to read.
The idea of the book is simple: Teach you about basic ideas and concepts when developing or designing software. The beginning starts with a fascinating story in how he realized about (what the author calls) “the universal laws of software development” and after that he start explaining concepts or tenets needed to do software right. The book is designed for anyone working in the production of software, yes, program managers, developers, architects, etc.
To be honest, the idea behind the book is good, but personally after a while it become repetitive and when you realized you already finished the book and start asking “was that old?”. Yes, most of the ideas in the book sound more like common sense in development, but, as my physics teacher in high school would say “common sense is not that common”.
With all of this I am not saying I didn’t learn anything, no, in all case the book helps you to confirm the general principles of software development and practices, go for it if for a short reading about software development, but honestly I think this could be delivered in a better way as a set of articles instead of a book this short.