Aaron Longwell is a web applications consultant with New Media Logic, LLC.

For several decades, computers and their software have been making all areas of our personal and business lives more convenient and more efficient. Hardware advancements have made our computers constantly more capable. We, as software developers, are using these advancements to make our clients' daily operations easier, less time-consuming, and more pleasant. Our software attempts as much as possible to isolate the mundane, repetitive tasks, and automate them. Interestingly, many of the tasks we automate for our clients are nowhere near as repetitive or mundane as software development itself.

That unfortunate irony is the driving force behind a new book from Manning, Code Generation in Action, by Jack Herrington. The book deftly balances the theory, techniques and politics of code generation. That's right, I did say "politics of code generation." Surprisingly, Herrington devotes more than a chapter to addressing the personal and staff conflicts that can occur when pursuing a code generation strategy. After making a convincing case that code generation can and should be used in most development projects, the book flows naturally through a quick academic analysis and into a series of code samples and case studies.

Despite its weakness in depth and detail, I would still recommend this book to virtually any developer or manager. It is an excellent introduction to the techniques and topics of code generation, and includes some solid analysis of the resistance you may experience when selling code generation to your development team. You'd be hard pressed to find a more complete introduction to code generation, and even the limited examples in the text are more complete than you'll likely find on the Internet.

I highly recommend reading the sample chapters available on the book's companion web site, codegeneration.net. The two chapters available for download are the best in the book, and make up a majority of the general code generation discussion. Chapter 1 includes the sales pitch for code generation, and Chapter 4 provides a complete explanation of the six discrete types of code generators. For some, Chapter 4 alone may give you enough background to get started writing a code generator for your project.

Read the entire review (pdf)...