Six hundred pages of very similar interviews with prominent software developers would probably put most people to sleep. As a programmer with three decades of experience, though, I found this pretty fascinating. The book has it’s faults: the interviews don’t seem very interactive - Seibel seems more interested in his prepared questions then in following up on interesting things his subjects mention. It’s also biased towards the craft’s elder statesmen. That’s not entirely bad, especially when the old guys’ opinions agree with mine. For example, many of them are not fond of IDE’s, think C++ is an abomination, have little interest in Java, and some shun debuggers. OK, I’m a dinosaur.
Many of the interview subjects equate programming more with literature than with math or even science, something I’ve long thought to be the case. Writing code and writing prose seem to use the same parts of the brain. It has never seemed odd to me that the father of Perl, Larry Wall (who is notably absent from “Coders at Work”), was a linguistics major.
This would be an excellent book for somebody considering taking up the software trade. It’s also a good book for people who want an “inside baseball” look at software development.