Well hey. Guess who had the #1 best-selling computer book in the US for week ending 10/12 (Bookscan)? The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition. -@PragmaticAndy
In the 1990s and 2000s, as editor-at-large for Dr. Dobb’s Journal, I was involved in evaluating software development books for the Jolt Awards. At some point I noticed that the most engaging and interesting books were coming from a small publishing house called The Pragmatic Programmers. I investigated further and learned that the pragmatic programmers slash publishers were Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, and that it was their experience in writing a book together and working with a publisher that convinced them to start their own technical book publishing company. The book was also called The Pragmatic Programmer, and it became an instant classic.
Time passes, Dr. Dobb’s Journal dies, and I start looking for a new gig. I call Dave and Andy and ask what I can do for them. We settle on a magazine, and PragPub is born, in the spirit of Dr. Dobb’s Journal. Also I begin editing books for them. I have been working with them ever since.
A decade later, The Pragmatic Programmer is now twenty years old and still a classic. But Dave and Andy wanted to keep it pragmatic. So they went to work on a new edition.
“20 years,” they say in the preface to the second edition, “is many lifetimes in terms of software. Take a developer from 1999 and drop them into a team today, and they’d struggle in this strange new world. But the world of the 1990s is equally foreign to today’s developer. The book’s references to things such as CORBA, CASE tools, and indexed loops were at best quaint and more likely confusing.
“At the same time, 20 years has had no impact whatsoever on common sense. Technology may have changed, but people haven’t. Practices and approaches that were a good idea then remain a good idea now. Those aspects of the book aged well.
“So when it came time to create this 20th Anniversary Edition, we had to make a decision. We could go through and update the technologies we reference and call it a day. Or we could reexamine the assumptions behind the practices we recommended in the light of an additional two decades’ worth of experience.
“In the end, we did both.”
And so they have recreated a classic. The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition, is a must-have book for software developers.