A Buffet For The Mind: Things Every Programmer Should Know

Time to break out the visine – the link leaves little doubt that you’ll be staring at the screen for hours to come after you check this one out.

A quick summary of the wiki:

…97 Things Every Programmer Should Know project, pearls of wisdom for programmers collected from leading practitioners. You can read through the Edited Contributions, browse Contributions in Progress, view the list of current Contributors, and also learn How to Become a Contributor yourself.

There is no overarching narrative: The collection is intended simply to contain multiple and varied perspectives on what it is that contributors to the project feel programmers should know. This can be anything from code-focused advice to culture, from algorithm usage to agile thinking, from implementation know-how to professionalism, from style to substance, etc.

Sometime around November, 97 contributions will be picked from the contributions made to this site and published in O’Reilly’s 97 Things series, which already includes 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know (see also here) and 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know.

The 97 chosen for the book will be the ones considered not only to be the best individually, but also the ones that fit best together. Every contributor whose contribution goes into the book will be fully acknowledged in the book and will get a complementary copy of the book when it is published. The contributions for the site are being edited by Kevlin Henney, who will also be listed as the editor of the published book.

Here’s a little taste of what’s in store at this O’Reilly Commons link.

• Fulfill Your Ambitions with Open Source by Richard Monson-Haefel
• Comment Only What the Code Cannot Say by Kevlin Henney
• Restrict Mutability of State by Kevlin Henney
• Speed Kills by Uncle Bob
• Encapsulate Behavior, not Just State by Einar Landre
• Only the Code Tells the Truth by Peter Sommerlad
• Interfaces Should Reveal Intention by Einar Landre
• Inter-Process Communication Affects Application Response Time by Randy Stafford
• Test for Required Behavior, not Incidental Behavior by Kevlin Henney
• Test Precisely and Concretely by Kevlin Henney
• Verbose Logging Will Disturb your Sleep by Johannes Brodwall
• The Road to Performance Is Littered with Dirty Code Bombs by Kirk Pepperdine
• Keep the Build Clean by Johannes Brodwall