Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #198413 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 366 pages

Customer Reviews

Zen and the Art of Computer Programming Maintenance
As an Extreme Programmer this book was given to me as a present from a 'Java Guru' who declared it to be the zen enlightenment text for all coders. It is a refreshing change from the normal teach-by-example technical books, with an obvious axe to grind.

'Everything is an object' is the fundamental premise of the text. Manager or Controller classes will become a thing of the past and we should all march gladly into this brave new world leaving behind the unenlightened unwashed untermensch with their pathetic procedural code which masquerades as being object-oriented just by virtue of existing in separate 'Class' files.

It is a glorious read for much of the book, but suddenly it seems to drown in its own smugness. You can almost see the buddha glow of the author as he describes the perfect development environment (you get the feeling the developers are reluctantly leaving the realm of pure thought to engage in a moment of Object creation which will persist timelessly and be reusable by all developers to come).

Programmers of the future will no longer need to create objects, they will already exist and all we will be doing is combining them in creative ways to create our applications.

Groovy Man.

Not Particularly Practical
This book has many good ideas but is badly written, is full of mistakes (most annoyingly where diagrams and associated text dont match) and lacks the details you'd need to apply large amounts of what it teaches.

If you really want to learn about object thinking, and most importantly how to apply it, then I'd recommend starting with the books of Robert C. Martin and Craig Larman. "Applying UML And Patterns" and "Agile Software Development" are both superb books.

Frustrating
Before writing this I read many other reviews of this book and was glad to find I wasnt alone in having problems with it. Firstly you need to have a very good grasp of English (and in a few cases a thesaurus at hand) to read it. Secondly the ideas are great but the presentation is bad (for example not showing us concrete examples of self evlauating rules). Lastly there are LOADS of mistakes that make it a very frustrating read, I got so bored of finding places where the diagrams and text in the book disagreed.

I recommend every programmer should get a book about object thinking but I dont think this is the one to buy.