Neal FordRezensionen

This book is a very high-level overview of the current thinking and challenges in modern software architecture and design. If you can stand the overuse and overstretching of terms from physics and biology such as "quantum", "quanta", "fitness function", etc. you can have a general idea about what it means to design for changeability.

If you subscribe to the idea that the software architecture means "the parts that are difficult to change", you already know how important to it is to design for relatively easy change, because change is one thing that will certainly happen to any software-intensive system that can survive at least a few months.

Some parts of the book is like time travel where the authors compare the architectural patterns from the end of 1990s and beginning of 2000s, and how things changed as of 2018: within the space of few pages they compare and contrast enterprise service bus based architectures with microservices.

The downside of the book: if you aren't already familiar with most of the concepts and techniques, it'll be difficult to understand what the book is all about. And if you're already familiar, then you know that for many of the topics mentioned, there are dedicated and well-written books.

If you want a very broad and high level overview, this book might serve you for a short period of time. If you want to go into more detail, you'll have to dive into titles such as "Infrastructure as Code: Managing Servers in the Cloud" and "Architecting for Scale: High Availability for Your Growing Applications|".½

Good examples of best practices and hints to be more productive.
It was an enjoyable reading.

Silent confession by the majority: Presentations are boring most of the time. Even when you are super enthusiastic about the presentations' topic, they are more or less a disappointment (and when you are not, you truly experience the death by a thousand slides). It is so rare to witness truly great presentations that I can easily remember most of them even after a decade. It is very easy to criticize a bad presentation and the presenter, but until this book, it was not that easy to point to a real solution.

I'm so happy that I can simply tell most of the presenters, hopefully before they unleash their minutes and slides of boredom and confusion on me and my fellow sleepers, to go and read this book twice, if not at least three times. But before I hit them on the head with this book (especially the software developers, who mostly believe that practicing something means giving a good and noteworthy presentation about it, even though they have witnessed uncountable evidence against it), I plan to read it for the second time, and then for the third time. And probably every time before I prepare a presentation, until I gather enough evidence to let me think that I'm capable enough to write a book that is even better.

The book is really about 'just stuff, no fluff', and staying loyal to its premise, it succeeds to provide the reader with concrete advice and step-by-step explanations for very effective presentations. It will probably not turn your next presentation into the keynote of the century, but it will definitely take you a few steps further ahead.

Enthusiastic praise aside, I must conclude with the fact that this book has recently helped me save a presentation I was preparing to present in a European Commission review meeting, in which some of the audience were in a position to evaluate the presented facts in order to decide whether they should let the project continue, or simply put an end to it. Needless to say, I was more than happy to hear their judgment.

A bit schizophrenic, as the author more or less admits right off the bat. The first half is for computer power users in general, covering the best ways to wean oneself from the mouse so the hands stay on the keyboard more; and a few power tools like text editors and stacking clipboards. I think just about anyone could benefit from one or more of these tips, although certainly if you spend any amount of time working with text documents, you should find quite a bit of useful stuff, even if you already consider yourself a power user.

The second half of the book is specific to programming, covering many of the more successful practices of the agile movement, such as test-first coding. If you've ever gone to a Neal Ford talk, you'll probably recognize quite a few of his tips.

So there's a somewhat disjointed feel, like it's reaching out to a couple of different audiences and not hitting either square on target. But if you're a computer power user or would like to be one, you'll probably find some tips here you haven't seen before.

I've been reading Neal's blog for a while. So I've been looking forward to the book. (I even accidentally ordered it twice - one was the pre-buy at amazon, which I forgot about).

I spend the last two days reading the book and found it quite helpful. There are a lot of concrete tips and examples for immediate use and daily improvement of your mechanic skills. Many of the experiences regarding the effective use of the tools at hand that he describes are well known to me. I can't really understand how developers are not keen to improve their productivity.
Neal's book is a good addition to the PragProgs masterpiece. It concentrates more on the mechanics and on some principles of productive software development. So the triad of values-principles-patterns got a son named mechanics.

What I missed in the book was:
* a comprehensive list of the notes at the end.
* Christopher Alexanders appearance as one of the philosophers.
* the notion of cheat sheets/refcards
* references to Martin Odersky's Scala the scalable language
* references to Kent Becks "Implementation Patterns" (especially in the SLAP section)

As being a developer myself I was a bit disappointed by the quality of the examples (the solutions not the starting points) and a bit by the correctness of the text (typos). I spotted several errors, some bad designs and some uninformed choices even on the first read of the book. I'll post them to the errata page.

Neals suggestion of an online repository of productive programmers tools, tips and mechanics is a great idea. I'd really like to join this effort.