Book Recommendation - The Productive Programmer, Neal Ford , O'Reilly [ISBN: 978-0-596-51978-0]

This book is an easy to read set of hints tips tools and theory to make you as productive as possible in your development work.
It is in two parts.

Part 1 highlights a whole series of tools (the 'Mechanics') to make you more productive.

Part 2 focus on various practices to make you more productive.

Neal uses Windows, OSX, and other Linux flavours in his day to day work so he mentions tools on all 3, or sometimes just hidden features of the OS itself. Some stuff I already knew but I found a wealth of goodies which I have been trying out since.

He structures these tips around the headings of

• Acceleration - doing stuff quicker
• Focus - doing stuff without distractions
• Automation - getting the computer to do the hard work
• Canonicality - making sure we have just one copy of things

The Canonical section was particularly interesting with good examples from his experience (which I could relate to) of times when not having central, common copies of certain resources can trip up and delay or damage development. Source control is the obvious example, but Neal has several more.

Part two of the book looks less at the Mechanics and more at how you work; the 'Practice' of being a productive programmer. Again some of his topics were familiar to me already, such as Test Driven Development, but most had new slants.

He ends this section with some interesting views on how programming languages are developing for the future. Neal sees more domain specific languages and that these will be used in combinations to solve problems.

The book has is own wiki at http://productiveprogrammer.com for you to contribute or discuss the topics raised.

Every development team should read this!