Coders at Work

632 pages

English language

Published Sept. 15, 2009

ISBN:
978-1-4302-1948-4
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Goodreads:
6713575

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4 stars (24 reviews)

1 edition

"Coders at Work" von Peter Seibel

4 stars

Das Buch besteht aus Interviews mit Menschen, die irgendwas wichtiges in der Welt der Softwareentwicklung, Software bzw. Informatik erreicht haben. An sich sind die Geschichten interessant und sehr unterschiedlich und das ganze ist redaktionell gut bearbeitet. Was fehlt ist eine gewisse Diversität der interviewten Personen. In der Regel sind es (mittel-)alte weiße Herren, die eine ähnliche Laufbahn vorweisen können. Wenn ich mich nicht irre ist unter den interviewten Personen lediglich eine Frau und eine Person of Color. Schade, das Buche wäre mit mehr Diversität sicherlich noch interessanter gewesen und könnte mehr Leser:innen ansprechen.

Review of 'Coders at Work' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I was initially very excited about this book's concept: a collection of interviews with many of computer science's best programmers. Unfortunately, this book is little more than that, and I came away a bit disappointed.

The quality of each individual interview is quite good. The reader gets a good sense of the interviewee's personal story, development philosophy, and personality.

But taken as a whole, the interview format becomes rather repetitive, and there is little to tie the book together other than some common interview questions and a constant reverence for Donald Knuth.

The overall format lends itself to a reference book, but the content is more narrative. Perhaps I'm just unaccustomed to reading collections of interviews, but I sadly found the overall reading experience fairly dull and unengaging as a result.

Lastly, at least in my edition, the text suffered from a number of typesetting errors: missing words, errant spaces, …

Review of 'Coders at Work' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

What felt missing to me, and why this is only 4 stars, was any attempt to pull the interviews together and synthesize something from them.
Instead, we get a book where, for example, N-1 coders are asked if they read Knuth right through, or use it for reference, or have not read it; and this is followed by Knuth basically demolishing the foundations of any conclusions you might be able to make from their answers, with a offhand comment that "I sometimes wonder if I can read them."

Anyway, this book was a much happier book for me than Beautiful Code. The interview style does mean that you feel you get to know most of the participants, and there is plenty of humbling and inspirational stuff, lots of interesting history, as well as lots of places where these big names show they're only human too -- for example, coder after …

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