The Rules of Programming: How to Write Better Code

This philosophy-of-programming guide presents a unique and entertaining take on how to think about programming. A collection of 21 pragmatic rules, each presented in a standalone 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
• Sometimes you just need to hammer the nails

Chris Zimmerman co-founded the video game studio Sucker Punch Productions in 1997 and led the coding team through twenty-plus years of successful video games, including three Sly Cooper games and five inFamous games, culminating in 2020's Game of the Year candidate Ghost of Tsushima. He split his time between designing and writing code, like the melee combat in Ghost, and the day-to-day work of building and managing a twenty-something person coding team. Prior to Sucker Punch, Chris spent roughly a decade at Microsoft, but the things he worked on there were much less interesting. He graduated from Princeton in 1988, and as a result owns more orange clothing than you do.