97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

Kevlin Henney and O'Reilly announced today that the web site "97 Things Every Software Programmer Should Know" is now public and open for contributions.

The "97 Things Every Software Programmer Should Know" book is part of a larger series of books which already includes "97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know" and "97 Things Every Project Manager should Know" both of which you can find at a book store or order from Amazon.com. The books are published by O'Reilly the folks that do the cool animal cover books. I edited the Software Architecture book and blogged about it back in February.

What is really cool about these "97 Things" books is that they are as close to open source as a book can get in my opinion. Each book contains contributions from people all over the world. Every contribution is licensed as Creative Commons, which is kind of like open source for literature. Each book contains 97 short essays from experts in a particular field.

The "97 Things Every Software Programmer Should Know" contains essays on every thing from how to improve performance of your software to advice about reading more from the humanities in order to improve your programming. Each bit of advice is written by a professional software programmer for other professional software programmers.

There are a lot of authors in this kind of book and you can be one of them! Anyone can make a contribution to the growing list. When the editors feel there are enough contributions, they will chose 97 of the best ones and put them in a paper book. This gives experts all over the world, who know programming inside and out and have really great advice, the chance to share their wisdom and get published for the first time.

Check out the growing list of submissions and learn a lot from people all over the world about the best practices in software programming. If you have an axiom or idea for a contribution, simply sign up to the wiki and submit it. If your contributions is poignant, coherent, and unique you may be published in a book from O'Reilly!