Code Complete

plinkplonk · on Feb 25, 2011

ok I'll go against the grain here but I personally found this book very tedious and of little value to me. But then I had been programming professionally many years when I encountered this book so maybe I was not part of the intended audience.

(Then again I found "Godel, Escher, Bach", another book that is almost universally lauded hereabouts, to be frothy and pretentious. So maybe it is just that I am weird.)

zwieback · on Feb 25, 2011

I'm with you on Goedel, Escher, Bach. Also, thanks for "frothy and pretentious" - adding it to my verbal arsenal now...

I like CC but also agree it's of less use to the seasoned programmer than to beginners. Then again, seasoning doesn't necessarily produce good habits.

DanielBMarkham · on Feb 26, 2011

Plink, you should go over to Amazon and put in a review. There's like 150 reviews over there and none of them are less than 3 stars.

Seriously. If you have a detailed criticism, it could help others not waste their time with the book.

I find many computer books tedious. Computer literature, for some reason, has a much greater variation in styles than other forms of literature. Some books are basically just big lists, and folks love 'em.

I read the book early in my career, so maybe your point about timing is a good one. Don't know. I do know that unless you're just being snarky, having an alternate point of view can be very useful for folks choosing what to spend their time on. I really regretted not being able to ding this book more. It'd be good to see a more detailed negative review.

And GEB is on my short list :) I still have a dog-eared copy from 1995 or something.

sruffell · on Feb 27, 2011

Even as a seasoned developer I think the book has value when trying to make the case to less-seasoned colleagues that they might want to think more critically about how they are structuring their code.

famousactress · on Feb 25, 2011

Me too. I think the first couple chapters contained a few really valuable truths that resonated me way back when I read the thing.. the rest of book was bleh.

cpeterso · on Feb 25, 2011

Code Complete was an epiphany for me. I read it right before graduating from university and it was great preparation for real-world programming work.

The other programming epiphany books for me were:

  * Eric Evans' "Domain-Driven Design"
  * Steve Maguire's "Writing Solid Code"
  * and SICP

crcarlson · on Feb 25, 2011

This is one of the books I had waiting on the desk of any new employee that I hired in the last 5 years. The whole book is a must read, but for me personally I referenced the sections on coding conventions and defensive programming for new employees all of the time.

The other practice I picked up from Steve was stepping through each code execution branch in the debugger to informally confirm the correct behavior when I was building w/o explicit unit tests.

DanielBMarkham · on Feb 25, 2011

This is one of those books that sometimes I wish I could force people to read.