Skip to Content
simplicity
book

simplicity

by Dave Thomas
June 2025
Intermediate to advanced
152 pages
3h 15m
English
Pragmatic Bookshelf
Content preview from simplicity
Practice 15Play in the Future, Work in the Past
Line drawing of Janus: a head shape with a face looking to the left and another to the right
Figure 1. The Roman God Janus, who faced both the past and the future

Maybe it’s just me, but whenever I come across something new and interesting, I want to roll it into my next project. It’s fresh, it has some new ideas, and I want to get experience using it for real.

I’ve learned the hard way that this is a bad idea. New technologies tend to change quickly, and I can spend more time migrating my code between releases than I spend coding.

New things have more bugs than old things. They may have worse documentation, less in the way of online support, fewer extensions, a scarcity of tutorials, and ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Grokking Simplicity

Grokking Simplicity

Eric Normand
Design It!

Design It!

Michael Keeling
Writing for Developers

Writing for Developers

Piotr Sarna, Cynthia Dunlop

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9798888651704