The Thoughtworks Anthology: Essays on Software Technology and Innovation by ThoughtWorks Inc.<br/>
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this first volume after reading its successor. Compared with the latter, I found the first volume to be slightly disappointing.

Like its successor, it’s a series of essays from Thoughtworks employees, including Martin Fowler. Whereas the second volume had some detailed, practical advice, I found this one to be much more vague and generic. It sounds almost as if it was written during the early years of the agile movement (which it maybe was), giving advice and recommendations that seem common sense today.

Martin Fowler’s article on Domain Specific Languages, although interesting, is of limited value now that his book on the subject has been published. Rebecca Parson’s article on programming languages sounds like yet-another-look-at-how-many-languages-I-know kind of article. Neal Ford’s article on Polyglot Programming recommends we build solutions with more than one language; well, people have been calling Fortran routines from C, or testing Java code with Scala, for several years now.

The only exception I want to make is Jeff Bay’s Object Calisthenics article. He proposes 9 rules to deliberately follow during your next project, and claims that following those rules will yield a superior design. This is one article I definitely want to apply, and which has practical value. Some of the rules sound extreme, such as “Don’t use any classes with more than two instance variables.”. But it’s definitely worth a look.
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