Essential Skills for the Agile Developer: A Guide to Better Programming and Design 1st Edition

I switch careers to software. I'm now a senior software engineer at Google. I can feel the gap between me and people who were well trained in software. I've observed a lot of good practices but did not understand how they did it and more importantly, why. I'm only a few days into this book and I can already feel the gap shrinking in a hurry. Highly recommended.

too generic

This is a well written book with a misleading title, a better title would be Essential Skills for the Object Oriented Developer (although most of the information would apply to Functional programmers also). I understand why they choose the title, as any developer who wants to do agile development must have a very firm grasp on these topics first. However, actual Agile techniques are barely mentioned, so anyone who buys this book looking to learn how to play planning poker or how to create an effective burn down chart will be disappointed.This is a short book at just over 200 pages, and as such it will not be very useful when it comes to teaching a non programmer how to program. The entire book is well written and frequently insightful. I found the introduction (preface and notes) and its quotes from Buckminster Fuller especially thought provoking with its unique way of looking at software development.The book is made up of a series short chapters, each of which briefly covers one programming best practice, which the book refers to as .Trim Tabs.. The .Trim Tabs. concept is explained in the introduction and is a way to look at the effect that minor changes to the way code is written can have major effects on productivity. Each chapter goes into just enough depth for someone with programming experience to understand the concept and nothing more. Each chapter also is very good at giving an example of a good book that is specific to the current topic so that anyone who wants more in depth information can easily find it.The first half of the book is dedicated to the low level practices of development such as refactoring, test driven development, encapsulation, and removing redundant code. The book does an excellent job of covering this broad range of topics in just under 100 pages. However, due to the brevity, an experienced developer may find themselves arguing with the book.s oversimplification of some topics.The second half of the book goes over more high level design and development practices such as the dangers of over designing a system, continuous integration, open-closed principle, Law of Demeter, and favoring aggregation over inheritance. It is in this section that I started to feel that the book should have been longer to do justice to some of the topics. All of the information they included was of the same high quality as the first portion of the book, but the complexity of the topics covered meant that a lot of information was left out. As an example, in the section on continuous integration there is only a page and a half on Continuous Integration Servers. No matter how well written that page and a half is, it isn.t going to convey the true value that CI servers can provide.This book is perfect for someone who is moving from a procedural language into the OO world for the first time. Also, anyone who.s team is considering doing agile development for the first time and wants to confirm that their current development practices are up to the task will find this book to be very useful.

As part of Net Objectives' Lean-Agile series, the authors' intent is to teach the "minimal set of skills developers need on the journey toward becoming adept at incremental development." In my opinion they've more than met that goal.With a focus on the fundamentals of good software development, "Essential Skills" is one of those rare books that is valuable to both beginners and experienced developers. Beginners will learn to develop high quality software, while experienced developers will be reminded of valuable practices they may have dropped while attempting to meet aggressive deadlines. But there's more.The authors also describe the benefits gained, which is quite useful if you're often asked to "cut corners" and deliver something sooner. (Imagine flashes of lightning and ominous music here.) Once business people see how rushing things out the door leads to lower code quality, and eventually results in longer deliver times, they tend to back off a bit.You've no doubt heard that moving a team that produces so-so software to an agile process won't improve the quality. They'll just produce it faster. However, using the skills you learn from this book will increase the quality of your software. And, over time, you may notice that it's sped things up too - whether you go agile or not.In short, I strongly recommend this book for both beginning and experienced developers, no matter what methodology you follow. I found myself nodding in agreement more than a few times as I read, and I think you will too.Oh, yes. One more thing. If you do nothing else, find someplace to read the Preface. Yes, that's right, the Preface. It's only two pages, but you'll learn about something called trim tabs and how Net Objectives applies them to software development. I think that if you understand the principle and find a way to apply it to your life, you will see great benefits. I don't know for sure yet, but I intend to find out.

I found this book to be very comprehensive, well-written and well-organized. I have been in software development for 12 years and currently act as an IT Director over a large group of 50+ developers. I plan on recommending that they all read this book, as having just finished the book, I can think of no other things to add that I wouldn't want to see out of the behaviors of those on my team. Truly understanding and living the content of this book will provide all of the tools in your toolbox to be a valued and essential asset to any agile technology team or organization.I especially appreciated Part 3 on Design Issues and Part 2 on General Attitudes. I find that many developers likely understand at a high-level the concepts in Part 1 at a surface level and, while Part 1 will provide essential deeper-dives on each concept, Part 2 and 3 help to bring it all together into specific attitude and thought-process guidance towards staying agile along the journey.The NetObjectives team authoring this book bring their vast wealth of experience and expertise from having blazed the trail in agile development since the very early days. Kudos to this team for taking the time to write this essential guidebook to help others growth in the agile space.

El libro lo compre por " el texto a voz " y no funciona para Kindle !!!

Für alle, die wie ich zur "Analysis Paralysis" neigen, eine gute Ansammlung von altbekannten und sinnvollen Design Prinzipien um zu Über- und Unterdesign zu vermeiden, verständlichen Code zu schreiben und zügiger voran zu kommen. Alle Prinzipien werden verständlich erklärt, bis auf ein paar vereinzelte sprachliche Aussetzer, und mit Beispielen und teilweise humorvoll vorgestellt.