Yet more Coders at Work reviews

Since I last did a rollup, Coders at Work has received three more reviews on the web, bringing the grand total to nine:

• Brian Carper, briancarper.net
• David Thole, The Dark Trumpet
• Vladimir Sedach, Slashdot
• Chris Hartjes, @TheKeyboard
• Marc Hedlund, O’Reilly’s Radar
• Amit Shaw, Teleported Bits
• Tobias Svensson, return 42;
• Prakash Swaminathan, CloudKnow
• Joseph F. Miklojcik III, jfm3> _

The reviews have continued to be quite positive and the Slashdot review turned out to be quite a coup, shooting Coders‘s Amazon Sales rank, for one glorious hour, up to #176 across all books. While perhaps nothing can complete with the Slashdot Effect for driving an instantaneous spike in interest, I am hoping that it will help to actually get the book into peoples’ hands, as should happen later this week.

Another person who got a sneak peek at the book, Andy Mulholland, the Chief Technology Officer at Capgemini, an $8-billion global consulting firm, sent me this review:

Just had a “sneak peek” at Coders at Work, a book by Peter Seibel due out in September that features interviews with 15 of the industry’s most important programmers.

Through in-depth interviews with the likes of Peter Norvig, formerly VP of Search at Google and now head of Google Labs, and Brad Fitzpatrick, founder of Live Journal, as well as elder statesmen such as Donald Knuth and Ken Thompson, Peter manages to capture the thinking behind these coders’ approach to their work. The book documents an older generation of software – much of it still in use – that coexists with today’s new and different types of applications. It’s as though you have multiple generations of cars on the road at the same time and everything is in flux – the cars themselves, the quality of the roads, the skill of the drivers, and the very purpose for which cars are used.

This book can help programmers sort through all this complexity. It would be a good read for all those studying software today because it provides a fundamental understanding of the world they are about to enter. I highly recommend it.

I guess if everyone–from Slashdot readers to someone advising the highest levels of big-company corporate IT–likes Coders, it’ll probably do okay.

Advertisement