Refactor Your Wetware (Beta)

2008-03-04T00:00:00+01:00

At the occasion of Read an eBook week'</a>, I thought I'ld do something you can't actually do with real books: buy (and read) a version of a book before it is released. Andy Hunt, author of the excellent book <a href="http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer">The Pragmatic Programmer' (a must read for every developer!), recently announced the availability of a beta' version of his new book, <a href="http://pragprog.com/titles/ahptl">Refactor your wetware'. This beta version is an early electronic version of the book, which gives the reader the opportunity to get a sneak peek at the book, and give feedback for the final version (which, as a beta book owner, you can also download when it is released). So, I went over to the `Pragmatic Bookshelf' store, ordered my copy, and got an e-mail with my personalized copy only a few seconds later.

As the subtitle of the book (Pragmatic Thinking & Learning') hints, the main subject of this book is our brain: how we learn things, how we become experts in a certain field, how we get new (innovative) ideas, how we solve problems, ... The goal is to use these understandings to become more effective in our learning process, to make it easier to get ideas and to solve hard problems. The book has a lot of the feel of The Pragmatic Programmer' to it: easy to read, very pleasantly written, a lot of descriptions of situations and experiences that sound very familiar, and a written description of some thoughts and theories that somehow were already floating around somewhere in your brain, but which you never really paid attention to; and, of course, mainly written from the perspective of a software developer. The book is filled with quite interesting statements and useful tips that will probably keep lingering on in your brain for quite a while. The insights into the human brain that the book provides seem to make a lot of sense, and explain a lot of real-life experiences.

Reading this (beta) book was fun and very learnful. Unfortunately, there is also a downside with a beta book. Not the occasional typo, not the layout that goes slightly wrong in a place or 2, but the fact that, just when you’re hanging on every word of the text, you end up with a few chapters that have nothing but `Coming soon'. Then again, this might be the perfect book for this to happen: while waiting for the second half of the book to appear, my R-brain will have a chance to index the raw data it recorded from the book in the background, and I might be able to read the remainder of the book with more context-awareness. Hey, I think I learned something!

El Tramo | Pragmatic Bookshelf

Refactor Your Wetware (Beta)