the Onda

When I first read "The Pragmatic Programmer" back in 2000, I remember being bowled over, not because there was any one brilliant insight, but because there were so many suggestions proposed by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt that succinctly described what I knew to be some of my better habits without really knowing why. It was almost as though they were reaching inside my brain and explaining things that I somehow understood without knowing why.

With what may come to be known as that book's sequel, "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning," Andy Hunt does exactly that— reaches inside your brain to take you on a mystery tour of it, from theories about skill acquisition (the Dreyfus model), to explaining how insight "bubbles up," to suggesting how you might improve various cognitive facilities. I've just finished the "beta 7" version of the book (available as a PDF for $22, but don't worry, with these guys beta 0.01 is much better than most publishers's final product), and I would whole-heartedly recommend it to any fans of PragProg, and even to any non-programmer involved in any kind of intellectual work who is curious about how their wetware (brain) works under different circumstances.

One note: the book will be even less relevant to software engineer's direct tools than PragProg was (though that still didn't stop PragProg from being the best book written for software engineers since "The Unix Programming Environment"). Think of it instead as the famous lost manual to the superhero suit in the TV show Greatest American Hero— except that instead of being the instructions to a super-powered suit made by aliens from space, this book will serve the manual for something much more important— your brain.

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