Book Review: Best Developer Job Ever! by Bruno Souza

General information

• Pages: 95
• Published by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
• Release date: july 2018

About the author

I should start this review with a personal comment about the author, Bruno as many Java developers know is one of the most influential leaders in the Java community, being in my case one of the people that adviced me to create a Duke's Choice Award winner project. Hence when he announced the release of his developers advisory book, It went directly to my reading list.

About the book

Different from some motivational books that I've read, this book is focused in just one topic with a practical approach:

How do I improve my professional carreer as software developer?

For a regular book reader it will be a very short book, it took me 3 hours to complete the book from start to end.

The book is divided in five main sections:

1. Get clarity on your strengths
2. Define your objectives
3. (How to) Expand your network
4. Promote yourself (in the right way)
5. Get quality interviews

From reading just the section titles, readers could be tempted to guess that this book is focused on boosting any professional carreer, however each section and advice is tailored to IT following an evolutive approach:

• Any advice starts with an argumentative step, presenting diverse paths to reach the same professional objective in IT and specially in software development
• After argumentation and based in author's real world experience, some advices are presented to choose the best path and take advantage of it in a productive way
• Finally, some tools, tips and techniques are presented and complemented with various success histories to validate the tips (whick I must say, I know them to be true)

Room for improvement

The main caveat for this book is that isn't available in other languages. I also noticed that despite presenting many usefull advices, it lacks of some diagrams to re-read the tips and act also as a developers carreer manual.

For the non-casual readers, the writting style could be interpreted as too informal or not so literary. As is, the book is written as an informal conversation between peers and it's a little bit repetitive while trying to emphasize some important points. It depends on readers background.

Who should read this book?

• Any IT professional, specialy software developers
• IT recruiters, it will give serious advices of how software development world works

To finish the review, I think that the following excerpt contains the spirit of the book

People can be givers or takers. The givers come in and bring things others can benefit from while the takers take more than they give and ultimately drag the network down by trying to benefit themselves. That’s why givers tend to grow more than takers or matchers.