Rating: 

The Productive Programmer is a book for those of us who willingly
spend our lives creating software. We know that some of our skills and
knowledge are constantly becoming irrelevant so we strive to keep
learning new things, and new ways of doing things, in the hope that
we'll stay ahead of (or at least not fall too far behind) the curve.

This book won't help with those skills; at least not directly. But it
will help you build the kind of foundational skills and ways of
thinking that make it easier to learn about the new and flashy things
because you're not wasting time in other areas.

The Productive Programmer is about maximizing your ability to
efficiently create good, working software. It's about leveraging your
computer's abilities, and learning how to master the tools you use
regularly. If you love being a developer and creating software then
you owe it to yourself to read this book and start becoming better at
it today. The information Neal shares in this book is worth twice the
price to anyone who creates software for a living.

The conversational tone makes it easy to read the whole thing quickly,
but the information density will have you referring back to it time
and again looking for a tool, or tip, that applies to what you're
currently working on.

The only complaint I have is pretty mild. A tear-out card with the
keyboard short-cuts would probably help people learn to use them
faster. Sure, we could make our own (and I am) but it does seem a
little inefficient to make us comb through the book to find them all.
*grin*

Thanks, Neal. It was well worth the wait. This book rocks!

Burk Hufnagel
Lead Software Architect
SCJP, SCJD, SCEA 5