The expanded universe.

It gives me great pleasure to announce that my new book Code That Fits in Your Head will be out in September 2021. The subtitle is Heuristics for Software Engineering.

Book cover.

Many regular readers have been expecting me to write a book about functional programming, and while that may also some day happen, this book is neither about object-oriented nor functional programming per se. Rather, it takes a step back and looks at various software development techniques and practices that I've found myself teaching for years. It covers both coding, troubleshooting, software design, team work, refactoring, and architecture.

The target audience is all the hard-working enterprise developers in our industry. I estimate that there's great overlap with the general readership of this blog. In other words, if you find this blog useful, I hope that you'll also find the book useful.

As the title suggests, the theme is working effectively with code in a way that acknowledges the limitations of the human brain. This is a theme I've already explored in my Humane Code video, but in the book I expand the scope.

Expanded universe #

I've structured the book around a realistic sample application. You'll see how to bootstrap a code base, but also how to work effectively with existing code. Along with the book, you'll get access to a complete Git repository with more than 500 commits and more than 6,000 lines of lovingly crafted code.

While I was developing the sample code, I solved many interesting problems. The best and most universal examples I used in the book, but many didn't make the cut. The book aims broadly at programmers comfortable with a C-based programming language: Java, C#, JavaScript, C++, and so on. Some of the problems I solved along the way were specific to .NET, so I found them a poor fit for the book. I didn't want these great lessons to go to waste, so instead I've been blogging about them.

These are the articles based on the code base from the book:

Some of these articles also use code examples from other sources, or code written specifically for that post, but whenever you see a code example from the restaurant reservation domain, it's from the book's code base.

That the above list represents the outtakes from the book's example code base should give you an idea of the richness of it.

I may add to the list in the future if I write more articles that use the book's example code base.

Conclusion #

A decade after my first book, I've finally written a completely new book. Over the years, I had a few false starts. This book wasn't the book I thought that I'd be writing if you'd asked me five years ago, but when it finally dawned on me that the topic ought to be Code That Fits in Your Head: Heuristics for Software Engineering, the book almost wrote itself.

This one is for all the software developers out there who aspire to improve their practical skills.


Comments

When will the book be available for pre-purchase in Europe/Denmark? Looking forward to reading it!

2021-06-23 12:26 UTC

Eric, thank you for writing. The book has already made its way to amazon.de and amazon.fr. On the other hand, it seems to be available neither on amazon.co.uk nor amazon.se.

Granted, it doesn't look as though you can pre-order on those two sites yet.

If you wish to buy the book directly in Denmark, I think that your best bet is to contact the book store of your preference and ask if and when they're going to carry it.

When and how to offer a book for sale is ultimately the purview of book sellers, so not something I can accurately answer. That said, you can already today pre-order the book on amazon.com, but it's probably going to cost you a little extra in shipping cost.

I'd expect that when the book is finally published, many of the above sites will also sell it. For what it's worth, the manuscript has been done for months. The book is currently 'in production', being proofed and set. As I understand it, this is a fairly predictable process, so I don't expect significant delays relative to the late September 2021 timeline.

2021-06-25 5:40 UTC

Will it be available as an eBook? Unexpectedly, Google shows no results.

2021-06-28 14:13 UTC

Serg, thank you for writing. Yes, the book will be available as both PDF and for Kindle.

2021-06-29 8:58 UTC

Excellent book! I highly recommend it to new and experienced software developers.

2021-12-20 23:56 UTC


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Monday, 14 June 2021 11:00:00 UTC

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Published: Monday, 14 June 2021 11:00:00 UTC