You're wasting time reading this review, you could be reading this book instead.

Release It! is one of the most important books I think programmers can read, easily as important as the oft-cited classics like The Pragmatic Programmer or the GoF book. Release It! isn't about writing super-spiffy code, or object-oriented design, but it should drastically affect how professional programmers write their code. It focuses on what engineers need to do to get their software into a state where it can actually be deployed safely in a production environment. It covers patterns and antipatterns to support (or subvert) stability as well as capacity, and the section of the book covering this is simply excellent. But then it goes beyond that to also discuss Operational enablement. Even if you're not into DevOps, and don't want to really be involved in DevOps work, this book gives you the tools and tips to do what aspect of DevOps is the purview of pure developers.

Nobody who writes production enterprise software should write another line of code until they read this book. I honestly can't give it enough of a glowing endorsement. Like any other patterns book, a great deal of it will be familiar to people who have been in the industry for a while, and have come up with (or encountered) its principles on their own. But I guarantee, if there's a single thing in the book you haven't seen before, it'll be worth reading the entire book, pretty much every section is gold.

My only complaint about it is that Michael Nygard has a tendency to go on randomish tangents, especially when talking about "case studies," which generally come off as the author trying too hard to convince the reader he knows what he's talking about. A lot of these stories are about things he personally encountered in his career, and how he fixed them, and each one has a weird arrogant quality, it's a little offputting to be honest, like Nygard is almost bragging. I get that these sections underscore the value of the ideas in the book, but there's something about how they're written that comes off boastful, or irritating in a way I can't quite put into words. What's more, the book STARTS with a particularly long one of these kinds of stories, making it kind of tough to get into the book. I actually tried to read it years ago and gave up on it very early. Only recently did I decide to revisit it and keep pushing forward (based on a co-worker's recommendation) and I'm extremely glad I did.

I highly, highly recommend picking up this book and reading it cover to cover. It's a struggle at first due to the unfortunate decision to start it off with one of the most annoying sections of the book, but I implore you to power through it and keep reading. It's worth it.