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Books

Writing Solid Code

Steve Maguire

Recommended by 1 person on the record.

The bar next to each date shows how long ago it was said: 6d is days, 4yr is years.

Philip O'Toole liked it
This book had a big impact on me as young software developer. It was the first time I saw in print the principle "bugs that go away by themselves come back by themselves". It's something that I've often repeated to myself, and my team, if nothing else but to prepare us mentally for when that hard bug does come back. The chapter advising developers to "proactively step through your code during development, don't wait for the bug report" improved my productivity enormously, and I followed the practice for many years.

on philipotoole.com · 25 Nov 2016

This book on rcmnd →

That little bar

It says how long ago something was said, so you can tell last month from 2014 without doing the arithmetic. Full and green is recent; it drains and cools as the date gets older, and empties completely at about 6 years.

A striped bar means the date itself is an estimate — the source did not carry an exact one. An entry with no date at all gets no bar.