The Productive Programmer

This book shows how to improve your life (and career) in software development by taking advantage of four key principles: acceleration, focus, automation, and DRYness. Learn from a highly experience master developer how to make your work time more effective. Discover how to avoid interruptions that break your focus; learn how discover the best tools for the job, and use them effectively; find out how to avoid repeating yourself as you're coding. Get the most you possibly can out of your tools, from your laptop or workstation to your development environment. We only get 24 hours in a day. Use them well.

Neal Ford is an Application Architect at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. Before joining ThoughtWorks, Neal was the Chief Technology Officer at The DSW Group, Ltd., a nationally recognized training and development firm. Neal has a degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University specializing in languages and compilers and a minor in mathematics specializing in statistical analysis. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, video presentations, and author of the books Developing with Delphi: Object-Oriented Techniques (Prentice-Hall, 1996), JBuilder 3 Unleashed (Sams, 1999) (as the lead author), Art of Java Web Development (Manning, 2003), and No Fluff, Just Stuff Anthology: The 2006 Edition (editor and contributor). His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Object Pascal, C++, and C. His primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. Neal has taught on-site classes nationally and internationally to all phases of the military and to many Fortune 500 companies. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at numerous developer conferences worldwide.If you have an insatiable curiosity about Neal, visit his web site at http://www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

Foreword	p. vii
Preface	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Why a Book on Programmer Productivity?	p. 2
What This Book Is About	p. 3
Where to Go Now?	p. 5
Mechanics
Acceleration	p. 9
Launching Pad	p. 10
Accelerators	p. 18
Macros	p. 33
Summary	p. 35
Focus	p. 37
Kill Distractions	p. 38
Search Trumps Navigation	p. 40
Find Hard Targets	p. 42
Use Rooted Views	p. 44
Use Sticky Attributes	p. 46
Use Project-Based Shortcuts	p. 47
Multiply Your Monitors	p. 48
Segregate Your Workspace with Virtual Desktops	p. 48
Summary	p. 50
Automation	p. 51
Don't Reinvent Wheels	p. 53
Cache Stuff Locally	p. 53
Automate Your Interaction with Web Sites	p. 54
Interact with RSS Feeds	p. 54
Subvert Ant for Non-Build Tasks	p. 56
Subvert Rake for Common Tasks	p. 57
Subvert Selenium to Walk Web Pages	p. 58
Use Bash to Harvest Exception Counts	p. 60
Replace Batch Files with Windows Power Shell	p. 61
Use Mac OS X Automator to Delete Old Downloads	p. 62
Tame Command-Line Subversion	p. 62
Build a SQL Splitter in Ruby	p. 64
Justifying Automation	p. 65
Don't Shave Yaks	p. 67
Summary	p. 68
Canonicality	p. 69
DRY Version Control	p. 70
Use a Canonical Build Machine	p. 72
Indirection	p. 73
Use Virtualization	p. 80
DRY Impedance Mismatches	p. 80
DRY Documentation	p. 88
Summary	p. 93
Practice
Test-Driven Design	p. 97
Evolving Tests	p. 99
Code Coverage	p. 105
Static Analysis	p. 109
Byte Code Analysis	p. 110
Source Analysis	p. 112
Generate Metrics with Panopticode	p. 113
Analysis for Dynamic Languages	p. 116
Good Citizenship	p. 119
Breaking Encapsulation	p. 120
Constructors	p. 121
Static Methods	p. 121
Criminal Behavior	p. 126
Yagni	p. 129
Ancient Philosophers	p. 135
Aristotle's Essential and Accidental Properties	p. 136
Occam's Razor	p. 137
The Law of Demeter	p. 140
Software Lore	p. 141
Question Authority	p. 143
Angry Monkeys	p. 144
Fluent Interfaces	p. 145
Anti-Objects	p. 147
Meta-Programming	p. 149
Java and Reflection	p. 150
Testing Java with Groovy	p. 151
Writing Fluent Interfaces	p. 152
Whither Meta-Programming?	p. 154
Composed Method and Slap	p. 155
Composed Method in Action	p. 156
Slap	p. 160
Polyglot Programming	p. 165
How Did We Get Here? And Where Exactly Is Here?	p. 166
Where Are We Going? And How Do We Get There?	p. 169
Ola's Pyramid	p. 173
Find the Perfect Tools	p. 175
The Quest for the Perfect Editor	p. 176
The Candidates	p. 179
Choosing the Right Tool for the Job	p. 180
Un-Choosing the Wrong Tools	p. 186
Conclusion: Carrying on the Conversation	p. 189
Building Blocks	p. 191
Index	p. 199
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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The Productive Programmer

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials