A fabulous, sprawling, opinionated and highly informative read, self-referentially incorporating a fair bit of code. If you want to know (a lot) more about the whole business of programming, how it works, what kind of people do it, why they do it, what tools they use, what controversies there are, how it is managed, etc, etc, etc, etc, this is a very long and often very entertaining read. It is hard to think of much that is not covered here, mostly in very accessible and illuminating ways.

Not every programmer will agree with everything that Paul Foot writes here - some things are deliberately incendiary and it is just possible that he may have a slightly blinkered view here and there - but anyone that wants to know more about the business and activity of coding, from those that know almost nothing about it to those that have done it forever, will find a lot to learn and reflect on here.