Peter Seibel interviews 15 of the most interesting computer programmers alive today in Coders at Work, offering a brand-new companion volume to Apresss highly acclaimed best-seller Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston. As the words “at work” suggest, Peter Seibel focuses on how his interviewees tackle the day-to-day work of programming, while revealing much more, like how they became great programmers, how they recognize programming talent in others, and what kinds of problems they find most interesting.

Hundreds of people have suggested names of programmers to interview on the Coders at Work web site: www.codersatwork.com. The complete list was 284 names. Having digested everyones feedback, we selected 15 folks whove been kind enough to agree to be interviewed:

• Frances Allen: Pioneer in optimizing compilers, first woman to win the Turing Award (2006) and first female IBM fellow
• Joe Armstrong: Inventor of Erlang
• Joshua Bloch: Author of the Java collections framework, now at Google
• Bernie Cosell: One of the main software guys behind the original ARPANET IMPs and a master debugger
• Douglas Crockford: JSON founder, JavaScript architect at Yahoo!
• L. Peter Deutsch: Author of Ghostscript, implementer of Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1
• Brendan Eich: Inventor of JavaScript, CTO of the Mozilla Corporation
• Brad Fitzpatrick: Writer of LiveJournal, OpenID, memcached, and Perlbal
• Dan Ingalls: Smalltalk implementor and designer
• Simon Peyton Jones: Coinventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler
• Donald Knuth: Author of The Art of Computer Programming and creator of TeX
• Peter Norvig: Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI
• Guy Steele: Coinventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five, currently working on Fortress
• Ken Thompson: Inventor of UNIX
• Jamie Zawinski: Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hacker

What youll learn
How the best programmers in the world do their job

Who this book is for


Programmers interested in the point of view of leaders in the field. Programmers looking for approaches that work for some of these outstanding programmers.

Table of Contents

1. Jamie Zawinski
2. Brad Fitzpatrick
3. Douglas Crockford
4. Brendan Eich
5. Joshua Bloch
6. Joe Armstrong
7. Simon Peyton Jones
8. Peter Norvig
9. Guy Steele
10. Dan Ingalls
11. L Peter Deutsch
12. Ken Thompson
13. Fran Allen
14. Bernie Cosell
15. Donald Knuth

Customer Reviews & Comments
If you are a person who cares at all about the art, craft, or science of software development, you will not be able to put this book down. Seibel (a hacker-turned-writer himself) talked to some big names in our field. Topics covered include: How do you learn to be a programmer? How do you perfect your skills? How important is formal education? Which programming languages are good and which are terrible? What kinds of tools do great programmers use? (Which text editors? IDEs? Debuggers?) How do you reason about a program, bottom-up or top-down? What's the best way to collaborate with other coders? etc. etc. As you might expect, the interviewees agree in some areas and wildly disagree in others, but there are insights aplenty. Some answers may surprise you, like how many of these coders shun formal debuggers and use mostly print statements, or how many of them shun IDEs for Emacs (or even pen-and-paper). Aside from the broad questions, Seibel gets the interviewees to open up about what it was like to work on the projects they are famous for. These stories are engaging and entertaining. Any coder who has stayed up till 4AM squashing bugs will find kindred spirits in these books. And the stories are somehow inspiring, as you realize that even great programmers suffer through the same frustrations and ups and downs that all of the rest of us go through. Those interviewed also share insights into what they think of our modern world of programming. Most agree that we live in complicated and troubled times as we battle layer upon layer of software complexity. This book has lessons to be learned from the very brief history of our field, and advice for the future ("Keep it simple!"). This book is deliciously buzzword-free and the programmers interviewed give their honest (sometimes brutally honest) opinions about what they love and what they hate. The author and all of those interviewed share a passion for programming and it's hard not to be swept up into it. Very good book.

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