The Tao of Programming is a book written in 1987 by Geoffrey James

Geoffrey James

Geoffrey James is an author, journalist, and freelance writer. His works have been published in Wired, The New York Times, and ComputerWorld. He has written several books. He lives in New Hampshire. From February 2007 to September of 2011, he wrote a blog about sales for CBS Interactive...

. Written in a tongue-in-cheek

Tongue-in-cheek

Tongue-in-cheek is a phrase used as a figure of speech to imply that a statement or other production is humorously intended and it should not be taken at face value. The facial expression typically indicates that one is joking or making a mental effort. In the past, it may also have indicated...

 style spoof of classic Taoist texts such as the Tao Te Ching

Tao Te Ching

The Tao Te Ching, Dao De Jing, or Daodejing , also simply referred to as the Laozi, whose authorship has been attributed to Laozi, is a Chinese classic text...

and Zhuangzi

Zhuangzi

Zhuangzi was an influential Chinese philosopher who lived around the 4th century BCE during the Warring States Period, a period corresponding to the philosophical summit of Chinese thought — the Hundred Schools of Thought, and is credited with writing—in part or in whole—a work known by his name,...

which belies its serious message. The Tao of Programming consists of a series of short anecdotes divided into nine "books":

• The Silent Void
• The Ancient Masters
• Design
• Coding
• Maintenance
• Management
• Corporate Wisdom
• Hardware and Software
• Epilogue

The themes of the book espouse many hacker ideals – managers should leave programmers to their work; code should be small, elegant, and maintainable; corporate wisdom is more often than not an oxymoron

Oxymoron

An oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms...

; and so on.

Geoffrey James wrote two more books like The Tao of Programming -- The Zen of Programming in 1988 and Computer Parables: Enlightenment in the Information Age in 1989. However, they have not been as well received.

External links

• An online version of The Tao of Programming
• An online version of The Tao of Programming
• The Unix Koans of Master Foo, by Eric S. Raymond
  Eric S. Raymond
  Eric Steven Raymond , often referred to as ESR, is an American computer programmer, author and open source software advocate. After the 1997 publication of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Raymond was for a number of years frequently quoted as an unofficial spokesman for the open source movement...
  
  , a writing with related tone and argument, as discussed in its introduction
• A Chinese translation of The Tao of Programming
• A Vietnamese translation of The Tao of Programming