Название: The Creative Programmer (Final Release)
Автор: Wouter Groeneveld
Издательство: Manning Publications
Год: 2023
Страниц: 232
Язык: английский
Формат: epub (true)
Размер: 37.6 MB

Creativity is essential to being a successful programmer. The stories, examples, and groundbreaking research in this book will help you unleash your creative potential!

Inside The Creative Programmer you’ll learn insights into creativity like
The seven dimensions of creativity in software engineering
The scientific understanding of creativity and how it translates to programming
Actionable advice and thinking exercises that will make you a better programmer
Innovative communication skills for working more efficiently on a team
Creative problem solving techniques for tackling complex challenges

In The Creative Programmer you’ll learn the processes and habits of successful creative individuals and discover how you can build creativity into your programming practice. This fascinating new book introduces the seven domains of creative problem solving and teaches practical techniques that apply those principles to software development. Hand-drawn illustrations, reflective thought experiments, and brain-tickling example problems help you get your creative juices flowing. You’ll soon be thinking up new and novel ways to tackle the big challenges of your projects.

about the technology
In software development, creative problem solving can be just as important as technical knowledge. A splash of creativity helps you break with conventional approaches that just aren’t working. And just like technical skills, creativity can be learned and improved by practice. This innovative guide draws on the latest cognitive psychology research to reveal practical methods that will make you a more creative programmer.

Different levels of creativity:

You might have noticed I’ve casually used the word genius in the context of creativity. Of course, it doesn’t take a genius to be creative. Researchers tried to classify different levels of creativity and came up with the following taxonomy:7

• little-c, or everyday creativity—This is personal creativity: doing something original you haven’t done before, for instance, cross-compiling your C++11 game of life implementation to the Game Boy Advance.

• Big-C, or eminent creativity—Doing something original nobody has done before, for instance, porting Ruby 3 to run on your 486 machine under DOS 6.22. Hey, there’s an idea...

Linus Torvalds is a Big-C creator. He completely changed the domain of operating systems (and version control). According to some scholars, “geniuses” are responsible for important creative products that alter the whole domain. On the other hand, coming up with a creative solution for your web app’s request throughput problem won’t likely shake things up.

about the book
Each chapter in The Creative Programmer introduces you to a new theme of creativity that’s derived from scientifically sound research. Discover the importance of communication, how constraints can make you more creative, methods to improve your critical thinking, and more. Short stories, examples, and exercises help you understand each new idea and clearly demonstrate how you can apply them to programming. You’ll even be able to track your progress against a scientifically validated Creative Programming Problem Solving Test! Along the way, you’ll enjoy examples and stories that show what makes creative technical geniuses tick.

The book is deep in its different aspects of creativity, from note taking and brainstorming to creative teamwork and creative techniques to apply. In addition to the practical tips, the book is grounded in solid scientific work and introduces relevant theoretical constructs related to creativity. I learned about organizing knowledge, common pitfalls in critical thinking, and how to use constraints to boost your creativity. I don’t doubt that The Creative Programmer will be useful to any programmer, from high schoolers taking their first steps in Python to seasoned C++ developers with decades of experience. I can’t wait to see what creative projects readers will come up with!

about the reader
For programmers of all experience and skill levels.

about the author
Wouter Groeneveld is a software engineer and computer science education researcher. Wouter was an enterprise software engineer for 11 years with a passion for teaching, coaching, and onboarding. Now, Wouter works at KU Leuven, where he researches and writes about non-technical skills and the importance of creativity in software engineering.