Product Description

Peter Seibel interviews 15 of the most interesting computer programmers alive today in Coders at Work, offering a brand-new companion volume to Apress’s highly acclaimed best-seller Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston. As the words “at work” suggest, Peter Seibel focuses on how his interviewees tackle the day-to-day work of programming, while revealing much more, like how they became great programmers, how they recognize programming talent in others, and what kinds of problems they find most interesting. Hundreds of people have suggested names of programmers to interview on the Coders at Work web site: www.codersatwork.com. The complete list was 284 names. Having digested everyone’s feedback, we selected 15 folks who’ve been kind enough to agree to be interviewed: * Frances Allen: Pioneer in optimizing compilers, first woman to win the Turing Award (2006) and first female IBM fellow * Joe Armstrong: Inventor of Erlang * Joshua Bloch: Author of the Java collections framework, now at Google * Bernie Cosell: One of the main software guys behind the original ARPANET IMPs and a master debugger * Douglas Crockford: JSON founder, JavaScript architect at Yahoo! * L. Peter Deutsch: Author of Ghostscript, implementer of Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1 * Brendan Eich: Inventor of JavaScript, CTO of the Mozilla Corporation * Brad Fitzpatrick: Writer of LiveJournal, OpenID, memcached, and Perlbal * Dan Ingalls: Smalltalk implementor and designer * Simon Peyton Jones: Coinventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler * Donald Knuth: Author of The Art of Computer Programming and creator of TeX * Peter Norvig: Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI * Guy Steele: Coinventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five, currently working on Fortress * Ken Thompson: Inventor of UNIX * Jamie Zawinski: Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hacker

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4587 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 632 pages

Customer Reviews

A great read, dip into it at random or read it cover to cover.
This is like a history textbook of the computing generation.

It's basically a collection of interviews with notable programmers, done in a very natural and readable style. If you're a techie, or you're in the technology industry in any way, then you should read it to get a sense of where "it" all came from, and especially to hear from some of the people who made it happen.

The contrast between the different interviews is interesting in its own right - you can go from one guy to the next to get a completely different or even opposing viewpoint, so the end result is a broad perspective.

It made me nostalgic for those days I spent hunched over a ZX Spectrum keyboard POKEing memory to see what happened :-)

Just go buy this book
This is one of those quintessential books that all Software Engineers need to read.
It will help validate and correct many of the foibles that we pick up throughout our professional life.

I can't recommend this book enough.

An interesting insight
This book is a set of informal interviews with a variety of well-known programmers. Peter Seibel's interviewing style is informed and probing and yet he covers similar topics in each interview, which makes for interesting comparisons. The style is like a drama with a number of actors rather than dry prose, which takes a little getting used to.

Some of the interviewees are clearly brilliant individuals, others would like us to think they are, and yet others are open and humble - which makes them all the more likeable.

What came across most to me was the common love of programming in these people and how they found their way into their various areas of expertise. Reading the book increases my confidence in my own abilities as I can relate to many of the stories described. There are times of inspiration, but lots of hard work and application to build successful software.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in the craft of programming and what makes programmers tick. It helps practising programmers, like myself, reflect on the essence of what we do and why it is so enjoyable.