Coders at Work

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, and misplaced punctuation. Given the context, they should be considered syntax errors, and the compiler should have caught them!

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 coder fesses up to using print statements for debugging.

Seibel got access to a great set of people, gave some quite good interviews where he managed some impressive followup questions on a wide and historically deep set of topics, and somehow got it to all hold together. Well done.