“Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”
Many books have been written about clean code, flexible code, etc. However, the “The Programmer’s Brain” book is different; it tackles different angles of reducing cognitive load. In other words, how we can minimize our consumed brain energy. What makes a piece of code easier to reason about and how to code that would make others lives’ (or our future self) easier reading in the future. The book assumes no prior knowledge about cognition so that any developer could pick it up.
Each chapter builds on the previous ones and focuses on how the cognitive cost can be reduced while reading or writing code. What’s unique in this book is that the suggestions and guidelines are backed by research.
But, of course, part of the things are not pure math. In the end, each individual might see things a bit differently. However, I think that’s part of the reasons that make programming a craft—being aware of how the brain functions can be taken to our advantage.
I highly recommend that book, and I’d argue it should be a must-read for any developer.
