The Pragmatic Bookshelf is about to release a new book with the name “The Passionate Programmer” by Chad Fowler. It may be not as inspiring as the masterpiece “The Pragmatic Programmer“, but a perfect read for entry-level programmer and people new to lean, agile and pragmatic thinking. I highly suggest the reading of this demo-chapter (pdf), about “incremental development”: Just be a little bit better, than yesterday. From the chapter:

“You also need to be happy with small amounts of “better”. Writing one more test than you did yesterday is enough to get you closer to the goal of “being better about unit testing”. If you’re starting at zero, one additional test per day is a sustainable rate, and by the time you can no longer do better than yesterday, you’ll find that you’re now “better about unit testing” and you don’t need to keep making the same improvements. If, on the other hand, you decided to go from zero to 50 tests on the first day of your improvement plan, the first day would be hard, and the second day probably wouldn’t happen. So make your improvements small and incremental but daily. Small improvements also decrease the cost of failure. If you miss a day, you have a new baseline for tomorrow.”

E-book download is already available for purchase. The printed version will be shipped around the 10th of May 2009.