Joe Kutner - The healthy programmer: get fit, feel better, and keep coding

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Ask a nondoctor about the likely afflictions of young patients, and he or she will most likely mention ankle sprains, tendonitis, and a few types of unpalatable infections.

However, the truth is rather less exciting, and certainly less related to sports. Our list instead includes back pain, headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, upper-limb syndromes, and low mooda list of maladies that is almost without exception due to a lifestyle filled with time spent stationary indoors, excess typing and repetitive wrist movements from mouse to keyboard, and inappropriate dietary intake.

Interestingly and, may I say, without coincidence, these themes mirror the contents of this book, with chapters related to topics such as the right chair, preventing eye strain, agile dieting, and the fascinating topic of vitamin D deficiency, which is only just being adequately explored in the scientific and medical literature.

Its a clich often used in the medical field, but prevention is better than cure is both relevant and highly correct. As doctors we so often find that by the time a patient presents with wrist or back pain, it will remain no matter what we do. Yes, we try everything that we have: analgesics, antispasmodics, physiotherapy, and even alternative therapies such as acupuncture and chiropracty. However, they tend not to work. There are often two factors at play. The first is that our patients, due to the pressure of their work, are incapable of improving the factors that drive their illnesses; the second is that good advice is hard to find and evaluate. For example, a simple Internet search for back-pain remedies will yield thousands of non-evidence-based diagnoses, cures, and quackeries. Is it a surprise that doctors, researchers, and even IT professionals have difficulty evaluating and recommending specific interventions?

In this book the author manages to take the most recent scientific literature, dissect it, analyze it, and apply it to a group of professionals whose needs are very specific. Of particular importance here is the focus not only on the immediate physical complications that can result from working as a software developer, but also on long-term cardiovascular health. It is now well recognized that those who spend their work lives sitting at computers, taking few total steps per day, are significantly more likely to suffer from hypertension (high blood pressure) and type-2 diabetes, both of which can have serious long-term consequences and increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

For a software developer who made the leap from looking after patients to looking after code (and myself!), it is refreshing and enlightening to see so many of the problems that I reflected upon for myself being given the proper exposure to a much wider audience. This is a text that both new and veteran developers should, and I might even say must , read.