Good examples of best practices and hints to be more productive.
It was an enjoyable reading. ( )

http://blog.justoaguilar.com/2009/03/the-productive-programmer-neil-ford/ ( )

A bit schizophrenic, as the author more or less admits right off the bat. The first half is for computer power users in general, covering the best ways to wean oneself from the mouse so the hands stay on the keyboard more; and a few power tools like text editors and stacking clipboards. I think just about anyone could benefit from one or more of these tips, although certainly if you spend any amount of time working with text documents, you should find quite a bit of useful stuff, even if you already consider yourself a power user.

The second half of the book is specific to programming, covering many of the more successful practices of the agile movement, such as test-first coding. If you've ever gone to a Neal Ford talk, you'll probably recognize quite a few of his tips.

So there's a somewhat disjointed feel, like it's reaching out to a couple of different audiences and not hitting either square on target. But if you're a computer power user or would like to be one, you'll probably find some tips here you haven't seen before. ( )

I've been reading Neal's blog for a while. So I've been looking forward to the book. (I even accidentally ordered it twice - one was the pre-buy at amazon, which I forgot about).

I spend the last two days reading the book and found it quite helpful. There are a lot of concrete tips and examples for immediate use and daily improvement of your mechanic skills. Many of the experiences regarding the effective use of the tools at hand that he describes are well known to me. I can't really understand how developers are not keen to improve their productivity.
Neal's book is a good addition to the PragProgs masterpiece. It concentrates more on the mechanics and on some principles of productive software development. So the triad of values-principles-patterns got a son named mechanics.

What I missed in the book was:
* a comprehensive list of the notes at the end.
* Christopher Alexanders appearance as one of the philosophers.
* the notion of cheat sheets/refcards
* references to Martin Odersky's Scala the scalable language
* references to Kent Becks "Implementation Patterns" (especially in the SLAP section)

As being a developer myself I was a bit disappointed by the quality of the examples (the solutions not the starting points) and a bit by the correctness of the text (typos). I spotted several errors, some bad designs and some uninformed choices even on the first read of the book. I'll post them to the errata page.

Neals suggestion of an online repository of productive programmers tools, tips and mechanics is a great idea. I'd really like to join this effort. ( )