Part Two – APPropriate Behavior

One of the key things that motivated me to write this part was picking up my copy of Code Complete, 2nd Edition—http://www.cc2e.com. I’ve had a copy of either this or the first edition of the book for most of my developer career. I hadn’t read it in a while, though, so I flicked through the table of contents looking for an interesting section to re-read.

The only parts that caught my eye were the sections at the back on the personality of a developer and on self-improvement. I find this odd; Code Complete is widely recommended as a comprehensive book on the craft of writing software. Rightly so; it’s helped lots of programmers (myself included) to introspect the way they practice their work, to understand and improve it.

Code Complete is certainly thick enough to be considered comprehensive. Why, then, when it has so much content on how code should be written, has it so little to say on the people doing the writing?

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