The Psychology of Computer Programming: Silver Anniversary Edition by Gerald M. Weinberg

Product Details

* Amazon Sales Rank: #500764 in Books
* Published on: 1998-09
* Number of items: 1
* Binding: Paperback
* 292 pages

Customer Reviews

You write the program and the program writes you5
I don't think you can actually "review" a book like this one. It's like reviewing Dostoevsky.

Sufficient is to say that this book is still highly relevant after 35 years, which is beyond any possible comparison. In fact, it doesn't bug you the least that the author speaks about new languages COBOL and PL/1 or programs being fed into a computer through a stack of punch cards. Because it doesn't matter, it's irrelevant to the matter discussed.

Which leads us to what the book is about. The book is really about the relationship between a human programmer and the programs he writes. The psychological aspects of programming, if it doesn't sound too obvious. And that did not change over the years. It is as helpful to a programmer today as I guess it has been at the time it was written. For a programmer to read this book is to increase self-awareness and understanding of the profession.

Neither very psychological nor very technical (on purpose, to encourage more people to read it), the ideas in this book come mostly from observation and there are plenty. See, the primary purpose of this book was to stimulate related research. It has apparently been achieved - as of now, it is referenced from all over the place as the major source.

A must read.

Unbelievably Bad!1
I think Wienberg must be spamming these reviews with a multitude of user names. That is the only explanation that can explain the four star average rating for this steaming pile of refuse. This is a book from an era when there must have been very low standards for 'popular' technical books. Weinberg is no psychologist, his observations are amateurish and ill informed. This book reads more like a 'best practices' work for the mainframe era. The most telling thing I can relate is my experience; after finishing a chapter I would read the chapter summary and not recognize a single thing from the chapter I had just read. The most laughable part was the coverage of programming languages. Wienberg is so completely ignorant of programming language research, even for that era, it's stunning. AND the man had (has) the gall to write on the subject as if he knows something. The most distasteful part of the book are the Anniversary Edition comments. They basically consist of Weinberg telling us that, he may not have been completely correct, but wasn't he amazingly prescient for the times? Gag. I'll never read another book by this author.

One of the key books on the people side of software4
If you're a developer (referred here as a "programmer") and something's not going just right in your work or group, try reading this book to see if the situations are somehow familiar. The stories about non-technical factors that affect code quality and developer's quality of life are the originals from 25 years ago, with a few-page update at the end of each chapter. While there aren't punch cards and batch jobs anymore, the situations still occur. Try to find your parallels in modern-day software development, where the tools may be new but the people are very much the same. (Do your best to ignore the chauvinistic comments here and there left over from a male programmer of 1971, for which the author now apologizes.) Interesting thoughts at the end about how language and compiler design also affects ease of writing good code.