- Paperback: 352 pages
- Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne (1 April 2008)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0071490833
- ISBN-13: 978-0071490832
- Product Dimensions: 22.9 x 18.6 x 1.9 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 229,584 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
Product Description
A-list Programmers Reveal How to Develop Breakout Skills
Find out what it takes to push your programming chops to the next level and design killer software by getting inside the minds of today's rock star programmers:
- Rod Johnson, Inventor of the Spring Framework
- Adrian Colyer, Pioneer of Aspect Oriented Programming Tools, Project Lead of AspectJ
- Java Posse--Tor Norbye, Joe Nuxoll, Carl Quinn, and Dick Wall
- Chris Wilson, Lead Architect of Microsoft Internet Explorer
- Nikhil Kothari, Architect of ASP.NET AJAX
- Hani Suleiman, Author of "The Bile Blog"
- James Gosling, Father of Java
- Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Creator of the Hudson Continuous Integration Tool
- Herb Schildt, The World's Bestselling Programming Author
- Floyd Marinescu, Co-founder of ServerSide.com; Founder and Lead Editor of InfoQ.com
- Andy Hunt, Co-founder of the Pragmatic Programmers
- Dave Thomas, Object Oriented Software Pioneer
- Max Levchin, Co-founder and Former CTO of PayPal
- Libor Michalek, Co-founder of Slide.com
- Weird Al Yankovic, The Programmer's Rock Star
About the Author
Ed Burns is a senior software engineer at Sun Microsystems and a well-known personality in the enterprise IT profession. He is the author of McGraw-Hill's JavaServer Faces:The Complete Reference.
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9 reviews
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
OK light reading if you're interested in IT personalities
4 Mar 2008
Format:Paperback
This book doesn't have any code tricks. It is just a series of interviews with people who have been instrumental in the software and IT industry over the past twenty years with an emphasis on more recent contributors. It mainly goes over how they look at problems and how they solve problems, with a good mix between their approaches to hard and soft skills. If you are a student doing a paper on the history of computing I'd say it would probably give you a pretty good look at some of the personalities involved in computing on which it is difficult to find much written. For example, James Gosling is the father of the Java language, but it is difficult to find any information on his approach to technical problems and his personality in general. This book gives you that kind of insight on Gosling and on other specific personalities that are leaders in the IT field. The final chapter on Weird Al Yankovic is rather strange, since he has nothing to do with the IT field and his intro has his qualifications listed as "The Programmer's Rock Star". I'm not sure how true that is, but it is an amusing chapter.
It's not for everyone, but it is a rare source for this kind of information.
It's not for everyone, but it is a rare source for this kind of information.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Superficial chats with enterprise programmers
17 April 2010
Format:Paperback
There are, roughly speaking, three worlds of programmers: the enterprise world, the startup world, and the academic world. As its ridiculous subtitle suggests, these interviews are with stars of the enterprise world, where Java and heavyweight IDEs dominate. If you don't use Spring and Eclipse, then most of the chapters will feel irrelevant to you. Personally, I'm a refugee from the Java world moving toward Ruby and Python (the languages that reign supreme in the startup world). The most pertinent interviews were with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, the founders of The Pragmatic Progammers. They do fine work; I'd much rather read just about any of their books than this one.
The overproduced design of this book is consistently annoying. Each interview is prefaced by a "Fact Sheet" about the rockstar programmer, with a baseball card-style breakdown of factoids. "Number of kids: Four." Uh, OK. Then the author places interjections throughout the chapter [and not just explanations on square brackets, though there are many of those] but also sidebars like: "Character attribute: Pragmatic, not excessive, optimizer." Ooookay. Why are you interrupting this interview to tell me that? It's as if the author expects me to go build a fantasy baseball team with these programmers. Then the book concludes with a totally superfluous interview with Weird Al Yankovic. Like the rest of the book, that interview doesn't know who its audience is: If you've never heard of Weird Al, it won't make you want to listen to him; and if you're already a fan, you won't learn anything new from it.
But the real problem with this book is the lack of depth. Interviewing programmers in depth without getting mired in too much technical trivia is a big challenge. Masterminds of Programming makes the opposite mistake, producing interviews that are tediously low-level. The one book of interviews with programmers that I'd recommend is Peter Seibel's outstanding Coders at Work. If you really want to know how smart programmers go about solving hard problems, that's the book to read.
The overproduced design of this book is consistently annoying. Each interview is prefaced by a "Fact Sheet" about the rockstar programmer, with a baseball card-style breakdown of factoids. "Number of kids: Four." Uh, OK. Then the author places interjections throughout the chapter [and not just explanations on square brackets, though there are many of those] but also sidebars like: "Character attribute: Pragmatic, not excessive, optimizer." Ooookay. Why are you interrupting this interview to tell me that? It's as if the author expects me to go build a fantasy baseball team with these programmers. Then the book concludes with a totally superfluous interview with Weird Al Yankovic. Like the rest of the book, that interview doesn't know who its audience is: If you've never heard of Weird Al, it won't make you want to listen to him; and if you're already a fan, you won't learn anything new from it.
But the real problem with this book is the lack of depth. Interviewing programmers in depth without getting mired in too much technical trivia is a big challenge. Masterminds of Programming makes the opposite mistake, producing interviews that are tediously low-level. The one book of interviews with programmers that I'd recommend is Peter Seibel's outstanding Coders at Work. If you really want to know how smart programmers go about solving hard problems, that's the book to read.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
great read
8 Jun 2008
Format:Paperback
I found this book a great read for a variety of reasons. I don't have an IT background but I enjoy reading about groundbreakers and top performers in any field -- hence my interest in the book. The author does a great job of getting at why these folks are RockStars and how they all think about programming and software. But it also does a great job of getting at the issues they face that we all share -- how do I keep up with the deluge of information in my field, how do I stay current with trends and changes in the industry, how do I maintain a work/life balance, etc? And for those with an IT background, there is some very technical information as well. And with the great interview with Weird Al at the end, there is something here for everyone. You'll find value in this book if you don't know COBOL from Ajax, are in CS 101, or are a 20 year industry veteran.
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