Book Review: The Practice of Programming

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The Practice of Programming, written by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike, was originally published in 1999. Although most programming books more than a couple years old are obsolete with out of date technology, The Practice of Programming is a pragmatic guide to become a better programmer regardless of your chosen language, framework, or supporting technologies. To quote the epilogue, "The world of computing changes all the time... but there are some constants, some points of stability, where lessons and insight from the past can help with the future." I highly recommend this book to any programmer who wants to establish good habits for writing understandable and consistent code. I also recommend this for programmers who want to or need to be able to work on projects with other developers. Although the exercises and examples were written in languages other than python, I was able to learn a lot. I reflected a lot on my own code, figured out new questions to ask about python, and am more appreciative that python does not suffer from some of the common pitfalls of other languages.