Member-only story
5 Essential Takeaways From “The Pragmatic Programmer”
Key points from the best-selling coding book of all time
The Pragmatic Programmer was first published in 1999 and has since been named the best programming book of all time.
Authors Andy Hunt and David Thomas were among the original authors of the Agile Manifesto and have some serious credentials. The book has achieved an average rating of 4.3 on Goodreads from over 16,000 ratings. Suffice to say it’s one of those books every programmer should read.
In this review, I’m going to condense the book into five essential takeaways.
1. Don’t Repeat Yourself
Thomas coined the term “DRY” (or Don’t Repeat Yourself), one of the most useful rules for achieving high-quality code that has ever existed. The authors define the DRY principle as follows:
“Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.”
In the book, they give the following example as non-DRY code:
