Peter Seibel: Coders at Work

A review by Russ Allbery and subsequent discussion pointed me to this book. I agree totally with him, so no need to repeat everything he said. This is indeed an immensely interesting book. The best thing about it is that it made me reflect about my own programming as well. For instance, with all these illustrious role models doing the same, I now feel less guilty about some things that I do myself, such as not diving deeper into the intricacies of debugging using gdb and things, but just going the easy way using debug printouts to learn about the state of my program. Or just rewriting passages of my code that I don't really understand instead of finding the bug and fixing it.

I also agree with Russ's rating of the book, 10 of 10 points. And apparently it is quite a success, too; when I recently mentioned the book to two of my colleagues, both had already read it.