Ford Neal. The Productive Programmer

O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2008. — 224 p.The individual productivity of programmers varies widely in our industry. What most of us might be able to get done in a week, some are able to get done in a day. Why is that? The short answer concerns mastery of the tools developers have at their disposal. The long answer is about the real awareness of the tools’ capabilities and mastery of the thought process for using them. The truth lies somewhere between a methodology and a philosophy, and that is what Neal captures in this book.Foreword.Why a Book on Programmer Productivity?
What This Book Is About.
Where to Go Now?
Mechanics.
Acceleration.
Launching Pad.
Accelerators.
Macros.Focus.
Kill Distractions.
Search Trumps Navigation.
Find Hard Targets.
Use Rooted Views.
Use Sticky Attributes.
Use Project-Based Shortcuts.
Multiply Your Monitors.
Segregate Your Workspace with Virtual Desktops.Automation.
Don’t Reinvent Wheels.
Cache Stuff Locally.
Automate Your Interaction with Web Sites.
Interact with RSS Feeds.
Subvert Ant for Non-Build Tasks.
Subvert Rake for Common Tasks.
Subvert Selenium to Walk Web Pages.
Use Bash to Harvest Exception Counts.
Replace Batch Files with Windows Power Shell.
Use Mac OS X Automator to Delete Old Downloads.
Tame Command-Line Subversion.
Build a SQL Splitter in Ruby.
Justifying Automation.
Don’t Shave Yaks.Canonicality.
Dry Version Control.
Use a Canonical Build Machine.
Indirection.
Use Virtualization.
Dry Impedance Mismatches.
Dry Documentation.Practice.
Test-Driven Design.
Evolving Tests.
Code Coverage.
Static analysis.
Byte Code Analysis.
Source Analysis.
Generate Metrics with Panopticode.
Analysis for Dynamic Languages.
Good citizenship.
Breaking Encapsulation.
Constructors.
Static Methods.
Criminal Behavior.
Yagni.
Ancient Philosophers.
Aristotle’s Essential and Accidental Properties.
Occam’s Razor.
The Law of Demeter.
Software Lore.
Question authority.
Angry Monkeys.
Fluent Interfaces.
Anti-Objects.
Meta-Programming.
Java and Reflection.
Testing Java with Groovy.
Writing Fluent Interfaces.
Whither Meta-Programming?
Composed method and slap.
Composed Method in Action.
Slap.
Polyglot Programming.
How Did We Get Here? And Where Exactly Is Here?
Where Are We Going? And How Do We Get There?
Ola’s Pyramid.
Find the Perfect Tools.
The Quest for the Perfect Editor.
The Candidates.
Choosing the Right Tool for the Job.
Un-Choosing the Wrong Tools.
Conclusion: Carrying on the Conversation.
Appendix: Building Blocks.