Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware by Andy HuntMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Context & Why I read this book
I work as a software developer aiming for mastery in this domain. Furthermore, I am currently conducting a "year of ratio & will" where I try to learn all about rationality and willpower.
What is the book about as a whole?
This is a book about learning and thinking pramatically, mostly but not exclusive to the context of software development, whereby pramatism is defined as "to do what works (for oneself)". The book touches on the areas of learning, expertise, creativity, personal knowledge management, productivity, and more...
The book's structure
The book is divided into 9 more or less linear chapters:
1. Introduction
2. Journey from Novice to Expert
3. This is Your Brain
4. Get in Your Right Mind
5. Debug Your Mind
6. Learn Deliberately
7. Gain Experience
8. Manage Focus
9. Beyond Expertise
However, the author is a proponent of non-linear thinking in the form of mind-maps and also provides a mind-maps of the book's content as an addition to the table of contents. He also provides some "Next Action" tasks at the end of important sections and chapters of the book.
The author further summarises his ideas in a collection of 20 tips throughout the book:
1. Always consider the context.
2. Use rules for novices, intuition for experts.
3. Know what you don't know.
4. Learn by watching and imitating.
5. Keep practicing in order to remain expert.
6. Avoid formal methods if you need creative, intuition, or inventiveness.
7. Learn the skill of learning.
8. Capture all ideas to get more of them.
9. Learn by synthesis.
10. Strive for good design; it really works better.
11. Rewire your brain with belief and constant practices.
12. Add sensory experience to engage more of you brain.
13. Lead with R-mode, follow with L-mode.
14. Use metaphor as the meeting place between L-mode and R-mode.
15. Cultivate humour to build stronger metaphors.
16. Step away from the keyboard to solve hard problems.
17. Change your viewpoint to solve the problem.
18. Watch the outlines: "rarely" doesn't mean "never".
19. Be comfortable with uncertainty.
20. Trust ink over memory; every mental read is a write.
One lesson
I really appreciated the author's presentation of the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition. It is a per-skill model with five stages: Novice (1), Advanced Beginners (2), Competent (3), Proficient (4), Expert (5). So going forward I will try to use this model for evaluating my skill levels in various areas.
Reading Recommendation / Who should read this?
I was slightly disappointed in this book since the author is renowned in the industry and I hoped this book would go more in-depth into how to actually get better at thinking and learning in the context of software development. But unfortunately, scientific studies, best practices of the community, and personal anecdotes and experiences of the author are intermixed and presented in a rather broad and shallow manner. In all of these topics, the author himself is no expert and therefore he cannot provide convincing and cutting edge content. Moreover, the author heavily relies on metaphors, often taking them too far to be taken seriously. On the other side, the book has a decent bibliography, an index and a summary of the "20 tips", all of which I appreciate.
So in sum, I give this a 6 out of 10 on my personal rating scale which means OK; the average read. Tangible weaknesses, but recommended with some reservations.
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