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A review by readingthething
The Programmer's Brain: What every programmer needs to know about cognition by Felienne Hermans
5.0
This review first appeared here
It’s always cool if friends write books. And it’s even cooler if they write books that are so much in your ballpark you can’t wait to read and review it. So it went with The Programmer’s Brain by Felienne Hermans. Since I am a BI developer, and have a MSc in Psychology, this book on “what every programmer needs to know about cognition” was exactly placed on the intersection of my interests. And I was not disappointed! I now want to recommend it to all coding people I know!
What does your brain do when you try to decipher code? How can you use these processes to your advantage? How can you help yourself and the people around you (like new coworkers you are onboarding) to create better code, which takes less mental energy to read and change and add to? I think my biggest take-away from this book is that it is okay to have to take your time to get familiar with a new set of code (and gave me some new tools on how to do this). It reinforced my belief that it is important to focus on naming conventions and coding style guidelines, because consistency in these things do increase how easy it is for others to read your code (or for yourself, if you get back to it after a while). Sometimes it feels like it’s a waste of time to get to an agreement within my small team on how we name our tables, but this book showed me it isn’t.
Some other good points about this book: it’s language independent. I write mostly SQL, and even I could do all the exercises in the book. Cause yes, another good thing: the book has questions to implement and try out the things you’ve just read about. It’s clearly written by someone with a background in educating others, with clear introductions and summaries of the material, plus a very natural building up of the knowledge (especially regarding the cognitive concepts, since those are probably the most new to the reader).
So, if you are write code in any way (or a manage people who do), go read this book, and see how research in the field of psychology can make you better (manager of) programmers.
It’s always cool if friends write books. And it’s even cooler if they write books that are so much in your ballpark you can’t wait to read and review it. So it went with The Programmer’s Brain by Felienne Hermans. Since I am a BI developer, and have a MSc in Psychology, this book on “what every programmer needs to know about cognition” was exactly placed on the intersection of my interests. And I was not disappointed! I now want to recommend it to all coding people I know!
What does your brain do when you try to decipher code? How can you use these processes to your advantage? How can you help yourself and the people around you (like new coworkers you are onboarding) to create better code, which takes less mental energy to read and change and add to? I think my biggest take-away from this book is that it is okay to have to take your time to get familiar with a new set of code (and gave me some new tools on how to do this). It reinforced my belief that it is important to focus on naming conventions and coding style guidelines, because consistency in these things do increase how easy it is for others to read your code (or for yourself, if you get back to it after a while). Sometimes it feels like it’s a waste of time to get to an agreement within my small team on how we name our tables, but this book showed me it isn’t.
Some other good points about this book: it’s language independent. I write mostly SQL, and even I could do all the exercises in the book. Cause yes, another good thing: the book has questions to implement and try out the things you’ve just read about. It’s clearly written by someone with a background in educating others, with clear introductions and summaries of the material, plus a very natural building up of the knowledge (especially regarding the cognitive concepts, since those are probably the most new to the reader).
So, if you are write code in any way (or a manage people who do), go read this book, and see how research in the field of psychology can make you better (manager of) programmers.