The Passionate Programmer

Author: Chad Fowler

Review created: 2015-02-16

The Passionate Programmer is a book about your career in the software industry, on how to explicitly manage it so that you get the career you want.

The book is divided into 53 sections, each of which a couple of pages (on average three pages or so), and a number of stories told by successful programmers. Each of the items is focused on giving you advice about some career related topic. E.g. one of the items talks about how to become a better programmer by finding people that are more skillful than you and working with them in order to learn from them. Another about how important it is to talk the language of the business people to improve the communication between yourself and "the suits".

The author used to be a professional musician before switching into the software industry, so the book is full of references to bands, how to practice music and so on. For example in the section about hanging out and working with better programmers there is a quotation from an old acquaintance of the authors Always be the worst guy in the band you're in. I think it might be that quotation that inspired the author to write that particular item.

In the end of each of the items, there is a list of actions points (in a section called Act on it), that you as a reader is encouraged to undertake in order to further your career in some particular way. These lists are filled with really good advice, and I hope I can get around to executing some of them. I don't, however, think anyone could/should implement all of them. Not simultaneously anyway. There is not enough hours in a day, and sometimes you need to eat as well ;) Examples of actions points proposed by the author are: try to learn a bleeding edge technology, try to learn a competing technology compared to the ones you already know and try to market yourself by writing articles, giving talks at conferences and staring a blog (hey, I've done that!).

The book is a very easy read, I finished it in three days. It is also entertaining and fun to read, almost like a novel. I'd would recommend it to anyone interested in furthering their careers. Or, more general, anyone interested in becoming a better programmer with a wider repertoire of useful skills.

One curious thing is that the author renamed the book between the first and the second edition. In the first edition, the book is called My Job Went to India, while in the second edition its name is The Passionate Programmer. The reason the author gives for doing this, is that he wanted to focus more on the positive content in the book and therefore removed a rather large part of the original book when working on the second edition. This has resulted in that the second edition of the book is in fact shorter than the first edition, which must be a rather rare occurrence. I've read both editions, although it has been quite a while since I read the first edition. This review is based on the second edition but, if I remember correctly, the first edition of the book was quite interesting as well.

Rating: 4 out of 5.