The Rules of Programming cover art

The Rules of Programming

The Missing Manual: How to Write Better Code

Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends December 16, 2025 11:59pm GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

The Rules of Programming

By: Chris Zimmerman
Narrated by: Ray Greenley
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends December 16, 2025 11:59pm GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Only £0.99 a month for the first 3 months. Pay £0.99 for the first 3 months, and £8.99/month thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Start my membership

About this listen

This philosophy-of-programming guide presents a unique and entertaining take on how to think about programming. A collection of twenty-one pragmatic rules, each presented in a stand-alone chapter, captures the essential wisdom that every freshly minted programmer needs to know and provides thought-provoking insights for more seasoned programmers.

Author Chris Zimmerman, cofounder of the video game studio Sucker Punch Productions, teaches basic truths of programming by wrapping them in memorable aphorisms and driving them home with examples drawn from real code. This practical guide also helps managers looking for ways to train new team members.

The rules in this book include: As simple as possible, but no simpler; Let your code tell its own story; Localize complexity; Generalization takes three examples; Work backward from your result, not forward from your code; The first lesson of optimization is don't optimize; A good name is the best documentation; Bugs are contagious; Eliminate failure cases; Code that isn't running doesn't work; and Sometimes you just need to hammer the nails.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2023 Chris Zimmerman (P)2023 Ascent Audio
Programming Programming & Software Development Software Development Technology Software

Listeners also enjoyed...

The Pragmatic Programmer: 20th Anniversary Edition, 2nd Edition cover art
Python Programming cover art
Clean Architecture cover art
Clean Code cover art
Java Programming: 2 Books in 1 cover art
User Story Mapping cover art
Modern Software Engineering cover art
Functional Programming in JavaScript cover art
Grokking Simplicity: Taming Complex Software with Functional Thinking cover art
The Art of Leadership cover art
Kill It with Fire cover art
Designing Data-Intensive Applications cover art
Staff Engineer cover art
Functional Programming in Scala cover art
Natural Language Processing in Action: Understanding, Analyzing, and Generating Text with Python cover art
Deep Learning with PyTorch cover art
All stars
Most relevant
Enjoyable listen with pratical and useful tips to follow in my current and future programing projects. It has some focus on examples in C++ and the game industry. Still worth a listen if not your language because the way its written can be relatable to other fields. I currently work in the data industry and I will be using some of the tips to improve my projects. If you like clean code and the pragmatic programmer you will enjoy this book.

good practical rules to follow for writing code

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.