Book Review

Computer books are a very hit-or-miss affair. I go through them like comic books but – like comic books – they rarely have much of an impact on me: I read along, nod, and ten minutes after I close the covers I’ve either compressed the whole thing into a crunched-down, dried-up mental summary or filed it away as something to look at for a very specific kind of reference.
It’s hard for a technical book to really engage a reader. Clarity, clean exposition and simply not peddling misinformation by accident or oversight are hard enough and many tech books fail to even hit those mares. Engaging style and memorable insights are even tougher to conjure up.

My personal favorite in this regard is The Art Of Readable Code by Dustin Boswell and Trevor Foucher. Unlike most tech books it’s not about technology, it’s about you. By which I mean it’s about how to approach programming problems with a pragmatic, long term view that’s about making your life more productive and less stressful in the long run by adopting smart practices. It’s not about whiz-bang tech - in fact, the book hops around between languages and problem sets and doesn’t really teach anything about programming per se; rather, it’s about writing: about making your code clear, expressive and humane. Programmer machismo often encourages us to write super-efficient alien artifacts which can be extremely impressive but which nobody wants to touch for fear of getting the Space Odyssey treatment. I’ve started forcing this book on all my new people: it’s better than a style guide because it teaches you things to think about, rather than giving you a list of things to memorize and follow.
(hat tip to @Pat Corwin, by the way, who turned me on to this one)
What got me thinking about tech books just now is the fact that I’ve recently found one that’s almost but not quite in that elite class of game changers. Effective Python, by Brett Slatkin, is more technical and a bit less fluent than The Art Of Readable Code. Still, it caught my eye because it seems like a great mile-marker on the road from “pretty good python user” to “real Pythonista.”

Effective Python does a great job of explaining and illustrating several features of the language which can be overlooked by folks coming from a scripting background rather than computer science. Many of the habits which separate the Python zen masters from the mere acolytes are explained neatly and clearly: the mysteries of the yield keyword, the evils of the mutable default argument, and the unfathomable allure of metaclasses are all dealt with clearly and in ways that don’t make you feel like a chump. Even better, the information is presented with a usable, practical slant: it’s neither an abstract set of rules to memorize nor a comp-sci nerdout about language features. Instead the book presents enough information for you to make good strategic choices: Perennial python puyzzlers like “list comprehension or loop?”, “Is it okay to use Try…except…else?” and “When to use propertites vs descriptors vs plain old fields” are all addressed in a reasonable, non-dogmatic way.
So, I’ll definitely be adding that one to the new-hire reading list in the future. Recommended!

PS if you haven’t checked out the Tech Art Bookstore in a while, I’ve added a bunch of new items over the last few months