Jeff Atwood is somewhat of a celebrity in software development and programming circles, he along with Joel Spolsky are the founders of StackOverflow.com, a question and answer website all programmers and software engineers must be familiar with.

The book, initially published in 2012, is constructed from posts on Jeff Atwood’s blog, CodingHorror.com. The posts are sorted into different sections based on an overall theme, for example, hiring programmers, workspace setup, code testing, etc. Thus, making for a coherent and flowing reading experience.  This is where the value of this book opposed to reading all these posts on his blog for free comes in, a more convenient reading experience.

Effective Programming More than Writing Code is one of the best and one of my favorite books on the topic of software development, it is a must-read for anyone who is a professional software developer, and personally, I have read through it numerous times over the years. The book is an easy, quick read and a vast amount of great ideas and concepts are communicated that will keep you thinking long after you have stopped reading.

There are however a few problems with this book, firstly in the print version there are quite a few printing errors where the top line of the page is cut off, this is present on 2 pages in my copy. This is not a problem in the electronic version available on the Kindle store.

Secondly, as this book was constructed from blog posts, numerous hyperlinks and embedded videos are present, which obviously do not work in a printed format. This is, however, more of an annoyance than a problem as this does not hinder the concept being communicated.

Even given these problems, I would still highly recommend this book. So, if you work in or are interested in software development, pick it up.