The Pragmatic Programmer

Key takeaways#

• Most of the advice is about reducing the cost of being wrong later, not about being right the first time.
• "Don't repeat yourself" is framed as being about knowledge rather than about text, which is a more useful reading than the one usually quoted.
• Tracing a problem to its actual cause instead of the first plausible one is presented as a discipline, not an instinct.

What I want to apply#

Keeping a running note of what I tried while debugging, so a long session leaves behind something more useful than a fixed file.

Where I disagreed#

Some of the tooling advice has aged; the reasoning behind it has not. The chapter recommendations are worth reading as principles rather than as instructions.