Merge pull request braydie#8 from braydie/master

merge master

Author: ahangchen

README.md

@@ -8,6 +8,8 @@ Licensed under [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licens
 
 [Available on gitbook to read online or download for offline reading (as PDF, ePub or Mobi)](https://www.gitbook.com/book/braydie/how-to-be-a-programmer/details)
 
+[Available to buy as a hardcover book (cost covers production & shipping only)](http://www.blurb.com/b/6999069-how-to-be-a-programmer) - Edition 1, published 04/01/16
+
 ## Introduction
 To be a good programmer is difficult and noble. The hardest part of making real a collective vision of a software project is dealing with one's coworkers and customers. Writing computer programs is important and takes great intelligence and skill. But it is really child's play compared to everything else that a good programmer must do to make a software system that succeeds for both the customer and myriad colleagues for whom she is partially responsible. In this essay I attempt to summarize as concisely as possible those things that I wish someone had explained to me when I was twenty-one.
 

en/2-Intermediate/Judgment/08-How to Talk to Non-Engineers.md

@@ -14,6 +14,6 @@ With your team, the basic assumptions and goals do not need to be restated often
 
 I love working with non-engineers. It provides great opportunities to learn and to teach. You can often lead by example, in terms of the clarity of your communication. Engineers are trained to bring order out of chaos, to bring clarity out of confusion, and non-engineers like this about us. Because we have technical judgement and can usually understand business issues, we can often find a simple solution to a problem.
 
-Often non-engineers propose solutions that they think will make it easier on us out of kindness and a desire to do the right thing, when in fact a much better overall solution exists which can only be seen by synergizing the outsiders view with your technical judgement. I personally like Extreme Programming because it addresses this inefficiency; by marrying the estimation quickly to the idea, it makes it easier to find the idea that is the best combination of cost and benefit.
+Often non-engineers propose solutions that they think will make it easier on us out of kindness and a desire to do the right thing, when in fact a much better overall solution exists which can only be seen by synergizing the outsider's view with your technical judgement. I personally like Extreme Programming because it addresses this inefficiency; by marrying the estimation quickly to the idea, it makes it easier to find the idea that is the best combination of cost and benefit.
 
 Next [Advanced skills](../../3-Advanced)

en/2-Intermediate/Personal-Skills/05-How to Balance Brevity and Abstraction.md

@@ -1,9 +1,9 @@
 # How to Balance Brevity and Abstraction
 
-Abstraction is key to programming. You should carefully choose how abstract you need to be. Beginning programmers in their enthusiasm often create more abstraction than is really useful. One sign of this is if you create classes that don't really contain any code and don't really do anything except serve to abstract something. The attraction of this is understandable but the value of code brevity must be measured against the value of abstraction. Occasionally, one sees a mistake made by enthusiastic idealists: at the start of the project a lot of classes are defined that seem wonderfully abstract and one may speculate that they will handle every eventuality that may arise. As the project progresses and fatigue sets in, the code itself becomes messy. Function bodies become longer than they should be. The empty classes are a burden to document that is ignored when under pressure. The final result would have been better if the energy spent on abstraction had been spent on keeping things short and simple. This is a form of *speculative programming*. I strongly recommend the article 'Succinctness is Power' by Paul Graham [PGSite].
+Abstraction is key to programming. You should carefully choose how abstract you need to be. Beginning programmers in their enthusiasm often create more abstraction than is really useful. One sign of this is if you create classes that don't really contain any code and don't really do anything except serve to abstract something. The attraction of this is understandable but the value of code brevity must be measured against the value of abstraction. Occasionally, one sees a mistake made by enthusiastic idealists: at the start of the project a lot of classes are defined that seem wonderfully abstract and one may speculate that they will handle every eventuality that may arise. As the project progresses and fatigue sets in, the code itself becomes messy. Function bodies become longer than they should be. The empty classes are a burden to document that is ignored when under pressure. The final result would have been better if the energy spent on abstraction had been spent on keeping things short and simple. This is a form of *speculative programming*. I strongly recommend the article ['Succinctness is Power' by Paul Graham](http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html).
 
 There is a certain dogma associated with useful techniques such as *information hiding* and *object oriented programming* that are sometimes taken too far. These techniques let one code abstractly and anticipate change. I personally think, however, that you should not produce much speculative code. For example, it is an accepted style to hide an integer variable on an object behind mutators and accessors, so that the variable itself is not exposed, only the little interface to it. This does allow the implementation of that variable to be changed without affecting the calling code, and is perhaps appropriate to a library writer who must publish a very stable API. But I don't think the benefit of this outweighs the cost of the wordiness of it when my team owns the calling code and hence can recode the caller as easily as the called. Four or five extra lines of code is a heavy price to pay for this speculative benefit.
 
 Portability poses a similar problem. Should code be portable to a different computer, compiler, software system or platform, or simply easily ported? I think a non-portable, short-and-easily-ported piece of code is better than a long portable one. It is relatively easy and certainly a good idea to confine non-portable code to designated areas, such as a class that makes database queries that are specific to a given DBMS.
 
-Next [How to Learn New Skills](06-How to Learn New Skills.md)
+Next [How to Learn New Skills](06-How to Learn New Skills.md)