Xiao Zeng (Chad)

The book covers a lot of topics — as advertised, it’s meant to be like a life manual for software developers. The benefit of this is you get the big picture and cover a lot of grounds in a short amount of time. So if you've just started your career like me, this book is definitely for you. The book also has a lot of practical advice about being self-employed, so if that’s a thing you’re considering doing right now or maybe in the future, it’s gonna be helpful to you as well. Although the other side of the same coin is that, the book lacks the depth to the subjects it’s covering, and not all the subjects are gonna be helpful to you specifically. So you might want to pick and choose the chapters when you read it, or just go with books that are more in-depth on each of the subjects, if you’re good with the basics already. Overall I think John did a pretty good job writing this book because it is insightful, and for the most part I can see he’s in my best interest since he will compare the strengths and weaknesses of options fairly like when he talks about working in a big vs medium-sized vs. small company. When he recommends something, he’s usually able to make pretty convincing arguments such as the chapter on resume.