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Coders at Work |  | Author: Peter Seibel
Publisher: Apress
Category: Book
List Price: $29.99
Buy New: $17.99
as of 11/23/2009 14:54 MST details
You Save: $12.00 (40%)
New (23) Used (8) from $17.49
Seller: EireBooks
Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 1257
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 632
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 6 x 1.3
ISBN: 1430219483
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.1
EAN: 9781430219484
ASIN: 1430219483
Publication Date: September 11, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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
What you’ll learn How the best programmers in the world do their job Who is this book for? Programmers interested in the point of view of leaders in the field. Programmers looking for approaches that work for some of these outstanding programmers.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 24
Programming inspiration - with a bad font November 13, 2009
William D. Oller
5 stars for content. In-depth interviews with the real pioneers of programming and language development.
-1 for the terrible font choice - I don't like Gill Sans as the primary font in a book. It's harder to read.
Bottom line: If you are a programmer, BUY THIS BOOK and read it in a well-lit room.
 This book offers no insight. November 8, 2009
Gregory A. Mccoy (Louisville KY, CA USA)
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
I picked this up and thought "what a wonderful idea for a book". After all, as a developer myself, what's more entertaining than reading about how others approach what I do? Well, this book failed to provide that insight. The questions don't seem to tailored to each "interviewed guru"; they're pretty cookie-cutter and you see them repeated all throughout the book. I frankly was not interested in why they wanted to program. I wanted to know how they solve problems. That's not a topic you'll find covered in this book. On the flip side, this book DID cover a topic that is quite trite and self-aggrandizing. The author kept asking each subject why nearly all other programmers (exceptions being the author and the interviewee, of course) were so poor at their profession. Guys, this is more of an editorial than a book about coders at work. I slogged through 3/4 of the book then skipped to the end to read about Knuth. Know what was there? A discussion of why less than 2% of the people in the world can ever hope to be good developers. High-horse, anyone?
 Boring November 7, 2009
Beatrix Willius (Germany)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book is a bad mixture of interesting nuggets and the very boring majority of the rest. The background of the programmers is rather diverse and they use many unknown acronyms. I managed to read 3 or 4 of the extremely long interviews and won't bother with the rest.
 Inspiring read November 2, 2009
Maxim Ischenko
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The book gives you excellent insight into how the great programmers think and work. Interview style prose gives you a nice feeling of sitting right next to the table where they talk with each other.
As for weak points - I wish some of the interviews were edited more aggressively to cut on some repetitive thoughts.
The choice of interviewees is very nice, although I'd love to see a "Volume 2" - there are plenty of viable candidates.
Must Read for Every Programmer November 1, 2009
Oud Bar-on (Tel Aviv, Israel)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
As with the previous "XXX at Work" book I read by Jessica Livingston (Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days (Recipes: a Problem-Solution Ap)), this is a must-read, of the thoroughly enjoyable kind. If you're a programmer by choice, and you enjoy programming, these interviews with the founding fathers of modern software will supply endless enjoyment and learning. I'm reading it a bit like good novel.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 24
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