Fat Agnus

I first learned about Barry Schwartz from a presentation he gave at TedTalks where he briefly talked about the subject of his book. It was so interesting, that I went and bought the book.

The book is about make decisions and how hard it can be with growing number of choices that are presented to us. Because we have all these choices, we can’t make a decision that we can be feel good about.

The book is very interesting but it also is bit to long. If you watch the TedTalk presentation then you get the most of the points that this book is talking about.

More about the book

“Think of it as brainstorming on steroids, coupled with some remarkable insights into how people work in groups.”
- Steve Krug, Don’t make me think 2nd Edition (under recommended reading)

You can put it any better then this.

The meetings I often attend to usually reminds me of something I read in a Dilbert Cartoon and I think that a lot will agree with me on this.

“There is no specific agenda for this meeting. As usual, we’ll just make unrelated emotional statements about things which bother us…”
- From a Dilbert cartoon

If one could just apply the methods from the book to any meeting, then I pretty sure that one would be on there way to something great.

I would love to buy copies and hand them out to my colleagues, but unfortunately the book has gone out of print. So I guess I will have to find another way to share the idea from the book. However, you can still find a good used copy at Amazon.com that is where I found mine.

This book is in the same category as Code Complete, it contains ideas and recommendations for any software developer. It doesn’t matter if you are new or an experienced developer, everybody can learn something from this book.

However if I should choose between this book and Code Complete, I would go with the second option. Code Complete is just an overall better book, but one thing that is really great about The Pragmatic Programmer is the tear-out card that you can find in the back of the book. It contains a checklist that has 70 short tips that could be seen as a guide on how to be a better developer.

Even though I recommend Code Complete over this, it doesn’t mean that it is a bad book. If you don’t have the time to read a thick book like Code Complete, then you should choose this. It would be sad if one didn’t read any of the books, because one would really miss out on a lot of great things that probably would take some years to discover by one own.

More about the book