Book Reviews
Interesting books I've read and found noteworthy enough to post a reivew of.
I hate to do this, but until .Text and/or the 'Junkies folks do something to rein in comment spam, I've turned comments off. I love feedback from everyone and some great discussions, but dealing with spam just takes too much time.
I finally finished reading The Bug by Ellen Ullman, author of Close to the Machine: Technophila and Its Discontents (which I haven't read). This took a while to read, not because it isn't fascinating but because I had it at a friend's house and so read it only sporadically.
This is the intriguing novel about Ethan Levin, a typical low-level programmer who thought he was hot stuff until bug UI-1017 (the 1,017th bug in the user interface in the project) turned his life to hell. The bug lived for 357 days (that's a little bit of a spoiler but not much), affecting both Ethan and his co-workers.
I found the novel to be a little bit tedious at times, but otherwise a rather fascinating read. I was particularly fascinated by the culture of the company in which Ethan and the bug thrived for so long before descending into the pits of despair. Debugging is such an art and I'm amazed that the author could build a good read around a single bug. She has long experience in the software development world and, while the technologies and situations are deliberately made up to fit the fiction, incorporated her experience in the weaving of the tale. But don't crack it open expecting to learn any debugging tips or strategies; it isn't intended to be instructional.
I'm not sure that I'd buy this book knowing now what I didn't know then, but would certainly get it from a library or borrow it from a friend.
I just finished one of those once-in-a-decade, must-read kind of books, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. It has officially earned a place on my list of highly recommended books.
The book is a sort of tips & tricks for serious programmers, a collection of 70 vignettes with pearls such as
1. Care about your craft
11. DRY--Don't repeat yourself
14. There are no final decisions
22. Use a single editor well
30. You can't write perfect software
44. Don't program by coincidence
50. Don't use wizard code you don't understand
59. Costly tools don't produce better designs
70. Sign your work
Each tip is explored in depth in the text. The authors draw heavily on their many years of programming experience. The book leans slightly in the direction of Java and C/C++, but mentions even .NET languages as appropriate. Not knowing Java and having completely forgotten all my C++ (thankfully) was no problem at all. The relatively few code samples served only as clear examples of concepts, not as a tool for teaching language.
In fact, number 28, Learn a text manipulation language, has such compelling arguments that I've picked up a copy of Learning Perl and am working to learn it to enhance my development abilities. I work with text so much every day that at the very least being able to create quick and efficient one-off tools can be a great time saver. Besides, knowing a few languages is only good for the career!
This is one of those books—the other major one being Strunk & White's Elements of Style, which I read to help my writing—that I think I'll re-read each year. Most of the material is timeless, at least during this stage of computer software development.