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Ask HN: What's your take on Pragmatic Bookshelf texts?

8 points by BadassFractal ↗ HN
I've had the opportunity to go through a few Pragmatic Bookshelf titles in the past years, such as the general programming Pragmatic Programmer, and several more language specific books like Agile Web Development with Rails.

I've recently started reading Pragmatic Thinking and Learning and Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, as I'm specifically interested in the general development/programming/learning topic, as I want to work towards being the best developer AND learner I can possibly be. It sounds to me like the Pragmatic folks strive to be the "you got to have it on your shelf if you're a serious developer" series.

Is that pretty much the case, and is one's time very well spent reading their texts, or is there even better literature out there that you'd personally recommend?

5 comments

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briandear
I love those books! Andy Hunt and the other Prag guys are not only nice guys, but their customer policies are very cool (beta books and free upgrades of ebooks.) As far as the quality of the texts, they are my go-to books. Except for The Rails 3 Way by Obie Fernandez, I think Prag has some of the best Rails books around as well as pretty much every other topic they choose to publish.
smiler
What's wrong with the The Rails 3 Way?
Brad_Smith
They remind me of where the O'Reilly books were in the late 90's: Consistently high quality and all worth reading.
mafro
I definitely rate the Prag Prog books as some of the best out there - starting with the original 'Pragmatic Programmer' book which always ends up on top ten lists.

I'd recommend the following:

- Release It!

- The Agile Samurai

ravikalaga
Pragmatic is the first place I have turned to after deciding to start building my product by myself. They are thankfully short and to the point.

My suggestion would be to start off with their books and then fork to other more in-depth resources available online.