Episode · The Pragmatic Engineer · 2025-09-10
Gergely Orosz & Steve McConnell: books mentioned on The Pragmatic Engineer
Code Complete with Steve McConnell
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Gergely Orosz discussed Code Complete by Steve McConnell and A Philosophy of Software Design by John K. Ousterhout. Steve McConnell discussed Rapid Development by Steve McConnell and What Got You Here Won't Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith and others.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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Code Complete
Code Complete by Steve McConnell is a comprehensive software construction guide that covers software engineering best practices, debugging, detailed design, and coding style.
Discussed“Code Complete is a single bus book on code construction which includes coding, debugging, detailed design, testing, and many more topics. It's also the most detailed one with an impressive 900 pages.”
Where to get it
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A Philosophy of Software Design
A Philosophy of Software Design by John K.
Discussed“I think it was John Alistster Sterhout who in in his book on software design a Philadelphia software design his suggestion was design it twice because the second time you'll get a better design than the first time.”
Where to get it
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Rapid Development
Discussed“And uh because the end phase of that was just painful and uh so then I worked for a couple years and the memory of the pain faded and uh I was kind of getting an itch to write something again. And so then I wrote my second book, Rapid Development.”
Where to get it
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What Got You Here Won't Get You There
What Got You Here Won't Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter is a prominent leadership and self-development book focusing on how behavioral habits that lead to initial success can become obstacles at higher career levels.
Discussed“You know, there's a great uh leadership book uh called What Got You Here Won't Get You There. And the the gist of it's really aimed at organizational leaders.”
Where to get it
Other mentions in this episode (2) — ad reads, self-promotion and passing references, never counted
“And uh and so I used that partly to guide what I did on the second book because I had a variety of books I I was interested in writing. And uh the the book that would have made the most sense after code complete would have been design complete.”
“And so you know today like when I was writing my book the software engineers guide book that was published uh two years ago one topic I was really unsure of should I include it or not a little bit to your agile thing was genai”