Title: A Perspective on Two Books

You recently published reviews of Kernighan and Pike's, The Practice of Programming and Hunt and Thomas's, The Pragmatic Programmer.

On the strength of your comments, I bought both books, which I have read.

Now, it is not that I disagree fundamentally with your enthusiasm for these titles. Rather I would just like to point out to intending readers the disparity of the approaches taken.

Like yourself I was greatly impressed with K & P, so much so that I immediately bought their The Unix Programming Environment and I was not disappointed by that either. Both these are full of practical, useful, meaty, hands-on tips. Whole chunks of code can be lifted from the text and applied immediately. My eyes were opened. Some of the material might be a bit dated (preference for shell scripts rather than Perl, troff rather than TEX), but such is the nature of Unix that tools are no less effective for their age! It is the philosophy that matters, not the particulars. Agreed, these are super, perhaps classical reads.

But the H & T books is another matter. It is comparatively woolly. 120 pages pass before one encounters a piece of code that can actually be put to practical use. Ironically H & T often give the same advice as K & P: use make, automate testing procedures, choose a good ascii-type, programmable editor ... But it is done at a distance - the examples are not concrete, they are not hands on. I left this book feeling: "interesting read, but lacks depth, lacks conciseness". It talks about being practical, rather than being itself practical. Humorous idioms like: "Use Tracer Bullets", or "The Cat Ate My Source Code" help to carry subtle points. But there are occasional clangers: "By architecting your system ..." !

Woolly as it might be, it offers some good advice on keeping the specification process under control, joining professional societies and reading material. A lot of the listed urls are dead.

Interestingly both these books miss a tip that I think should be considered by all programmers and it is easily implemented: learn how to touch type. (It cost me 30 quid to learn 20 years ago and it has proved to be the best money ever I spent - helps me greatly when writing book reviews.)

But essentially your enthusiasm is well founded. Both books have something valuable to say, although from different perspectives.