Career Programmer

When Chris Duncan first asked me to do the foreword to his book, I didn't think it would be that tough to do. How hard could writing a foreword be? Compared to some of the projects I worked on in the past such as BoundsChecker, writing a book, or my current job of debugging others' impossible bugs, writing a foreword should be a piece of cake. However, within reading a couple of pages of The Career Programmer, I became extremely nervous because Chris is a far better writer than I can ever hope to be. The last thing I want to do is detract from great writing, and more importantly, an extremely important message for the software business. You've probably looked at the back cover or flipped through the pages and noticed that this book is not what you would expect to find in the computer books section of the typical bookstore. There are a billion books on how to use the hot technology du jour and maybe a few on project management, but this is the first book to directly address the developer and what it takes to get your real job done. Isn't it amazing that the software engineering field has been around this long and this is the first book written for the real engineer? We'd love to say that we spend our days coding, but we really don't.