If you intend to write software that lasts and fares well during its journey, give yourself a hand and read this book. From actual situations, the author derives very concrete recommendations towards writing scalable and operable applications.
As far as I am concerned, reading this book has been an exhilarating experience. Though to a much smaller scale, I have experienced the same pains and came to similar conclusions than the author. Reading some pages entailed some sheer moments of excitement, very much like: "I have been saying the same!".
All in all, I am grateful that Michael Nygard has written such an authoritative book on this crucial matter for now no-one will be allowed to say "I did not know" anymore.
This book does a pretty good job at offering insights and real world feedback from top notch ThoughtWorkers on a variety of software development related subjects (coding, designing, building, QA). For a collection of essays from different authors, the overall uniformity has been pretty well maintained both on style and content.
As a software developer, I have found Neal Ford's "Polyglot Programming" and Jeff Bay's "Object Calisthenics" to be the most compelling pieces of this book.
At the end of the day, the real interest of this anthology resides in the fact that a small consulting firm has decided to share its sheer passion for software in a direct and hype-free manner. How many of the big ones out there could do the same?
