97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

PLEASE NOTE: This is a copy of the official list and I only copy it here for my own personal purposes (in case the list is lost), and not because I am trying to circumvent copyright or profiteer from it.

  1. Act with Prudence by Seb Rose
  2. Apply Functional Programming Principles by Edward Garson
  3. Ask “What Would the User Do?” (You Are not the User) by Giles Colborne
  4. Automate Your Coding Standard by Filip van Laenen
  5. Beauty Is in Simplicity by Jørn Ølmheim
  6. Before You Refactor by Rajith Attapattu
  7. Beware the Share by Udi Dahan
  8. The Boy Scout Rule by Uncle Bob
  9. Check Your Code First before Looking to Blame Others by Allan Kelly
  10. Choose Your Tools with Care by Giovanni Asproni
  11. Code in the Language of the Domain by Dan North
  12. Code Is Design by Ryan Brush
  13. Code Layout Matters by Steve Freeman
  14. Code Reviews by Mattias Karlsson
  15. Coding with Reason by Yechiel Kimchi
  16. A Comment on Comments by Cal Evans
  17. Comment Only What the Code Cannot Say by Kevlin Henney
  18. Continuous Learning by Clint Shank
  19. Convenience Is not an -ility by Gregor Hohpe
  20. Deploy Early and Often by Steve Berczuk
  21. Distinguish Business Exceptions from Technical by Dan Bergh Johnsson
  22. Do Lots of Deliberate Practice by Jon Jagger
  23. Domain-Specific Languages by Michael Hunger
  24. Don’t Be Afraid to Break Things by Mike Lewis
  25. Don’t Be Cute with Your Test Data by Rod Begbie
  26. Don’t Ignore that Error! by Pete Goodliffe
  27. Don’t Just Learn the Language, Understand its Culture by Anders Norås
  28. Don’t Nail Your Program into the Upright Position by Verity Stob
  29. Don’t Rely on “Magic Happens Here” by AlanGriffiths
  30. Don’t Repeat Yourself by Steve Smith
  31. Don’t Touch that Code! by Cal Evans
  32. Encapsulate Behavior, not Just State by Einar Landre
  33. Floating-point Numbers Aren’t Real by Chuck Allison
  34. Fulfill Your Ambitions with Open Source by Richard Monson-Haefel
  35. The Golden Rule of API Design by Michael Feathers
  36. The Guru Myth by Ryan Brush
  37. Hard Work Does not Pay Off by Olve Maudal
  38. How to Use a Bug Tracker by Matt Doar
  39. Improve Code by Removing It by Pete Goodliffe
  40. Install Me by Marcus Baker
  41. Inter-Process Communication Affects Application Response Time by Randy Stafford
  42. Keep the Build Clean by Johannes Brodwall
  43. Know How to Use Command-line Tools by Carroll Robinson
  44. Know Well More than Two Programming Languages by Russel Winder
  45. Know Your IDE by Heinz Kabutz
  46. Know Your Limits by Greg Colvin
  47. Know Your Next Commit by Dan Bergh Johnsson
  48. Large Interconnected Data Belongs to a Database by Diomidis Spinellis
  49. Learn Foreign Languages by Klaus Marquardt
  50. Learn to Estimate by Giovanni Asproni
  51. Learn to Say “Hello, World” by Thomas Guest
  52. Let Your Project Speak for Itself by Daniel Lindner
  53. The Linker Is not a Magical Program by Walter Bright
  54. The Longevity of Interim Solutions by Klaus Marquardt
  55. Make Interfaces Easy to Use Correctly and Hard to Use Incorrectly by Scott Meyers
  56. Make the Invisible More Visible by Jon Jagger
  57. Message Passing Leads to Better Scalability in Parallel Systems by Russel Winder
  58. A Message to the Future by Linda Rising
  59. Missing Opportunities for Polymorphism by Kirk Pepperdine
  60. News of the Weird: Testers Are Your Friends by Burk Hufnagel
  61. One Binary by Steve Freeman
  62. Only the Code Tells the Truth by Peter Sommerlad
  63. Own (and Refactor) the Build by Steve Berczuk
  64. Pair Program and Feel the Flow by Gudny Hauknes, Ann Katrin Gagnat, and Kari Røssland
  65. Prefer Domain-Specific Types to Primitive Types by Einar Landre
  66. Prevent Errors by Giles Colborne
  67. The Professional Programmer by Uncle Bob
  68. Put Everything Under Version Control by Diomidis Spinellis
  69. Put the Mouse Down and Step Away from the Keyboard by Burk Hufnagel
  70. Read Code by Karianne Berg
  71. Read the Humanities by Keith Braithwaite
  72. Reinvent the Wheel Often by Jason P Sage
  73. Resist the Temptation of the Singleton Pattern by Sam Saariste
  74. The Road to Performance Is Littered with Dirty Code Bombs by Kirk Pepperdine
  75. Simplicity Comes from Reduction by Paul W. Homer
  76. The Single Responsibility Principle by Uncle Bob
  77. Start from Yes by Alex Miller
  78. Step Back and Automate, Automate, Automate by Cay Horstmann
  79. Take Advantage of Code Analysis Tools by Sarah Mount
  80. Test for Required Behavior, not Incidental Behavior by Kevlin Henney
  81. Test Precisely and Concretely by Kevlin Henney
  82. Test While You Sleep (and over Weekends) by Rajith Attapattu
  83. Testing Is the Engineering Rigor of Software Development by Neal Ford
  84. Thinking in States by Niclas Nilsson
  85. Two Heads Are Often Better than One by Adrian Wible
  86. Two Wrongs Can Make a Right (and Are Difficult to Fix) by Allan Kelly
  87. Ubuntu Coding for Your Friends by Aslam Khan
  88. The Unix Tools Are Your Friends by Diomidis Spinellis
  89. Use the Right Algorithm and Data Structure by JC van Winkel
  90. Verbose Logging Will Disturb Your Sleep by Johannes Brodwall
  91. WET Dilutes Performance Bottlenecks by Kirk Pepperdine
  92. When Programmers and Testers Collaborate by Janet Gregory
  93. Write Code as If You Had to Support It for the Rest of Your Life by Yuriy Zubarev
  94. Write Small Functions Using Examples by Keith Braithwaite
  95. Write Tests for People by Gerard Meszaros
  96. You Gotta Care about the Code by Pete Goodliffe
  97. Your Customers Do not Mean What They Say by Nate Jackson