10 May 2020
This book is a continuation of Martin's "Clean Code" (2009), also published by Prentice Hall. It's been a long time since I read much of Clean Code, and what I looked at for that book was more for reference - the older book was granularly broken down per topic, so I didn't try to read it front to back. This follow-up book was structured differently, more about business practices and communication techniques rather than coding. This book was recommended by our manager to review for work, but it's not in order so I wanted to read it all the way through first.
As a coding book it's alright. I suspected it'd be somewhat similar to another book (that I really enjoy) called Head First Software Development (2007, Pilone, published by O'Reilly Media), since I knew Clean Coder covered a lot of the syntax and stylistic things that usually come out of software books. I thought a few chapters were quite good: Saying No (Ch. 2), Saying Yes (Ch. 3), and Time Management (Ch. 9) stand out the most to me. Other chapters weren't of as much benefit to me specifically, like Coding (Ch. 4), Estimation (Ch. 10) and Tooling (Appendix A), but I think that was more due to personal experience versus his anecdotal references. So there's still a little value in those chapters if you have industry experience.
It was a fairly easy and quick read, and I got value out of it. I'd still suggest the Head First book over this (more because I felt the dialog and examples in that book are a little more relatable, and Martin's experiences may not translate as well to younger audiences in particular). But even with the examples they were comprehensive and explained well. 4/5