Most software development books are about…software development— this one isn’t. There are plenty of books out there about writing good code and using various technologies, but I’ve been hard-pressed to find a book that told me how to be a good software developer.

This book isn’t about what you can do. This book is about…you. That’s right. It’s about your career, your life, your body, your mind, and—if you believe there is such a thing—your soul. Now, I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of lunatic. I’m not a transcendentalist monk sitting on the floor meditating while smoking Peyote leaves, trying to help you ascend to a higher state of consciousness. On the contrary, I think you’ll find I’m a pretty down-to-earth kind of guy who just happens to think that being a software developer is about a whole lot more than writing code.

In the pages of this book you’ll find quite a few seemingly unrelated topics strung together, but there is some semblance of reasoning behind this madness. This book is divided into seven sections, each focusing on a different aspect of your life as a software developer. If you wanted to categorize and group these sections it would be easiest to look at them as career, mind, body, and spirit.