Tools don’t make a programmer great any more than a fancy guitar makes a guitarist great. Put me on the fanciest guitar you can find, and I’ll make it sound like a washtub full of cats. But have you noticed that most great guitarists still have swank gear?
Great programmers are passionate about their tools in the same way. The right tools multiply the productivity of a great programmer. If you have the skills and a small effort can crank up your output to eleven, you’d be crazy not to take advantage of it, right?
This chapter introduces tools common to all software work. The time you invest in considering each tool discussed here will repay itself many, many times over during your career. You should also keep the same openness of mind in the years ahead; new tools will be created that may serve you better, or your career may take you into specialized realms where a different tool is better suited to the work.
Tip 9, Optimize Your Environment starts us off by making the most of your day-to-day tools.
Next we step back and consider the source code itself: Tip 10, Speak Your Language Fluently focuses on polishing your use of programming languages.
One more step back: Tip 11, Know Your Platform looks at the whole software (even hardware) stack.
Sometimes slacking is good. In Tip 12, Automate Your Pain Away, we make the computer help out.
Tip 13, Control Time (and Timelines) introduces the version control system to help manage code across time and among programmers.
Finally, sometimes it’s best if you don’t do the work yourself. Tip 14, Use the Source, Luke talks about integrating open source software with your commercial projects.
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