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Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming [Paperback]

P Seibel (Author)
4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
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Book Description

Publication Date: 13 Sep 2009 | ISBN-10: 1430219483 | ISBN-13: 978-1430219484 | Edition: 1

Peter Seibel interviews 15 of the most interesting computer programmers alive today in Coders at Work, offering a companion volume to Apress’s highly acclaimed best-seller Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston. As the words “at work” suggest, Peter Seibel focuses on how his interviewees tackle the day-to-day work of programming, while revealing much more, like how they became great programmers, how they recognize programming talent in others, and what kinds of problems they find most interesting.

Hundreds of people have suggested names of programmers to interview on the Coders at Work web site: www.codersatwork.com. The complete list was 284 names. Having digested everyone’s feedback, we selected 15 folks who’ve been kind enough to agree to be interviewed:

  • Frances Allen: Pioneer in optimizing compilers, first woman to win the Turing Award (2006) and first female IBM fellow
  • Joe Armstrong: Inventor of Erlang
  • Joshua Bloch: Author of the Java collections framework, now at Google
  • Bernie Cosell: One of the main software guys behind the original ARPANET IMPs and a master debugger
  • Douglas Crockford: JSON founder, JavaScript architect at Yahoo!
  • L. Peter Deutsch: Author of Ghostscript, implementer of Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1
  • Brendan Eich: Inventor of JavaScript, CTO of the Mozilla Corporation
  • Brad Fitzpatrick: Writer of LiveJournal, OpenID, memcached, and Perlbal
  • Dan Ingalls: Smalltalk implementor and designer
  • Simon Peyton Jones: Coinventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler
  • Donald Knuth: Author of The Art of Computer Programming and creator of TeX
  • Peter Norvig: Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI
  • Guy Steele: Coinventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five, currently working on Fortress
  • Ken Thompson: Inventor of UNIX
  • Jamie Zawinski: Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hacker

What you’ll learn

How the best programmers in the world do their jobs!

Who this book is for

Programmers interested in the point of view of leaders in the field. Programmers looking for approaches that work for some of these outstanding programmers.

Table of Contents

  1. Jamie Zawinski
  2. Brad Fitzpatrick
  3. Douglas Crockford
  4. Brendan Eich
  5. Joshua Bloch
  6. Joe Armstrong
  7. Simon Peyton Jones
  8. Peter Norvig
  9. Guy Steele
  10. Dan Ingalls
  11. L Peter Deutsch
  12. Ken Thompson
  13. Fran Allen
  14. Bernie Cosell
  15. Donald Knuth

Frequently Bought Together

Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming + Founders at Work : Stories of Startups' Early Days: Stories of Startups' Early Days (Recipes: a Problem-Solution Ap) + European Founders at Work
Price For All Three: £47.06

Buy the selected items together

Product details

  • Paperback: 617 pages
  • Publisher: APRESS; 1 edition (13 Sep 2009)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1430219483
  • ISBN-13: 978-1430219484
  • Product Dimensions: 15.2 x 3.2 x 22.9 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 253,283 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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More About the Author

› Visit Amazon's Peter Seibel Page
Peter Seibel
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Product Description

About the Author

Peter Seibel is a serious developer of long standing. In the early days of the Web, he hacked Perl for Mother Jones and Organic Online. He participated in the Java revolution as an early employee at WebLogic which, after its acquisition by BEA, became the cornerstone of the latter's rapid growth in the J2EE sphere. He has also taught Java programming at UC Berkeley Extension. He is the author of Practical Common LISP from Apress.
Inside This Book (Learn More)
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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars An interesting insight 1 Nov 2009
By Mr. G. Normington
Format:Paperback
This book is a set of informal interviews with a variety of well-known programmers. Peter Seibel's interviewing style is informed and probing and yet he covers similar topics in each interview, which makes for interesting comparisons. The style is like a drama with a number of actors rather than dry prose, which takes a little getting used to.

Some of the interviewees are clearly brilliant individuals, others would like us to think they are, and yet others are open and humble - which makes them all the more likeable.

What came across most to me was the common love of programming in these people and how they found their way into their various areas of expertise. Reading the book increases my confidence in my own abilities as I can relate to many of the stories described. There are times of inspiration, but lots of hard work and application to build successful software.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in the craft of programming and what makes programmers tick. It helps practising programmers, like myself, reflect on the essence of what we do and why it is so enjoyable.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars A collection of interviews 6 Feb 2010
By Olivier Andre
Format:Paperback
This book is literally the transcription of 15 interviews, do not expect more than that. Interviewed are fifteen programmers who have left a visible imprint on the world of programming as it stands now. The author reminds us in a short introduction that the field of computer programming is only 70 years old and a large part of the programmers he interviews started in the field punching cards roughly 40 years ago. The author asks similar questions to all his interlocutors enabling the reader to draw comparison on some topics such as: How do you proceed when you write new code? How do you debug code? How do you approach other coders programs? What do you look for when hiring programmers? How did you start coding...

I read that book cover to cover, in places it could have been better edited. In terms of content, I found it both interesting and lacking. Interesting, because the programmers interviewed achieved a lot and one always gain something from learning about the circumstances of those achievements. On the lacking side of my impression, well it is hard to define: The author promises on the back-cover to give us insight into how great programmers learned how to code and how they go about programming and he certainly delivers that in their own words, but, as could be expected, out of 15 interviews you get 15 different answers and it is impossible to draw any conclusion.

In a sense I am not sure the question "how do you code?" has a lot of meaning, I get the feeling that it is similar to asking mathematicians how they think when they do mathematics. In the end it probably is the body of produced code that should be the focus of our interest and actually, quite a few of the programmers interviewed in the book mentioned that they themselves devoted time to reading other programmers code to further their mastery of the field (or satisfy their curiosity about how programs, be they compilers or applications, work). I think the book would have gained from leaving aside the questions of how the interviewed programmers code and focusing more (because there is some of that in the book) on their opinions about the evolution of their different fields of expertise.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars A great read, dip into it at random or read it cover to cover. 24 Oct 2009
By J. Erlank
Format:Paperback
This is like a history textbook of the computing generation.

It's basically a collection of interviews with notable programmers, done in a very natural and readable style. If you're a techie, or you're in the technology industry in any way, then you should read it to get a sense of where "it" all came from, and especially to hear from some of the people who made it happen.

The contrast between the different interviews is interesting in its own right - you can go from one guy to the next to get a completely different or even opposing viewpoint, so the end result is a broad perspective.

It made me nostalgic for those days I spent hunched over a ZX Spectrum keyboard POKEing memory to see what happened :-)
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars Underwhelming
Having looked at this book time and again, I was waiting for Santa to bring some vouchers and pick it up, its sat on my wishlist to that effect for weeks. Read more
Published 5 months ago by J. Bond
5.0 out of 5 stars stories, perspectives and experiences that make you think
I'm a professional software developer for about 11 years. I have some stories and ideas about software development and programming in specific. Read more
Published on 5 May 2011 by Luis Sergio Oliveira
5.0 out of 5 stars Valuable insight into how real programmers think
A book of interviews with programmers: why would that be interesting? It is because Siebel asks just the sorts of practical questions you would want to ask if you were face to... Read more
Published on 10 Mar 2011 by Marcus
2.0 out of 5 stars Tedious
There are some interesting nuggets here, but by about the halfway point the identical series of questions to each interviewee becomes tedious. Read more
Published on 7 Oct 2010 by jcs
5.0 out of 5 stars Essential reading for anyone interested in the craft of programming
I really enjoyed this book. Each of the interviees had an interesting tale to tell and the questions Siebel asks are well targeted to bring these out. Read more
Published on 17 Sep 2010 by J Root
2.0 out of 5 stars An unexciting book
Really quite boring, laid out in a question & answer format. You need to be a rea geek to enjoy this!
Published on 16 Sep 2010 by Alan
4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating look into what makes these software pioneers tick
I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, especially the parts where people like Donald Knuth tell of their learning processes, how they came to think about the profession and... Read more
Published on 6 Dec 2009 by Robbert Jan van M.
5.0 out of 5 stars Really fun reading
If you think your life is rubbish because you have to do mostly tedious and boring stuff at work, there is no fun or feeling that you do something cool, please read this book. Read more
Published on 1 Dec 2009 by Alexander Demin
5.0 out of 5 stars Surprisingly high signal to noise ratio for an interview book
It's entertaining and easy to read.
But at the same time insightful and packed with wisdom.

Certainly worth a dozen "Teach yourself ASDF . Read more
Published on 12 Nov 2009 by Ruslan Shestopalyuk
5.0 out of 5 stars Just go buy this book
This is one of those quintessential books that all Software Engineers need to read.
It will help validate and correct many of the foibles that we pick up throughout our... Read more
Published on 12 Oct 2009 by Vishal Vatsa
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