I enjoy reading the Worse Than Failure site as an antidote for programmer arrogance. While a junior programmer might look down on the people who made the reported mistakes, those of us who have been in the business for a while can recognize many of the mistakes. They still make a good laugh. A few… Read More »
Learn to Program Chris Pine Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2006 Every now and then most programmers get asked the question, How do I get into programming? I am usually on the lookout for beginning books on programming, specifically for this reason. When I first saw Learn to Program from the Pragmatic Bookshelf, I thought it was probably… Read More »
Can just anyone learn to program or is that skill limited to a few of us? This question or some variant has been on my mind for most of my career. Early in my career, I thought programming required inherent talent, so only some people were capable of learning to program. As I gained more… Read More »
I ran across an unusual article a couple of months ago, Ethical Software by Alex Bunardzic » Right Tool for the Job is a Myth. My first thought was that the author must be out of his mind. After some reflection, I have a somewhat different view. Now I just think he is mistaken. I… Read More »
I don’t often write about something quite this geeky, but it is just too cool not to share. First Several months ago, I read about an interesting module for Linux called SSHFS. This module allows you to mount a file system over SSH. This gives a way to access files on another server that you… Read More »
Practical Subversion, second edition Daniel Berlin and Garrett Rooney Apress, 2006 Two years ago, I reviewed the first edition of Practical Subversion. The second edition has substantially updated the reference information about the Subversion commands. The previous edition had been based on a pre-1.0 version of the program and had somewhat incomplete coverage of the… Read More »
Recently, Joel Spolsky wrote about Don Norman’s article Simplicity Is Highly Overrated. Joel used this as a springboard to another talk of how simplicity doesn’t matter in Joel on Software: Simplicity. He referenced and expanded on his views from Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth. As I’ve said before, I often find Joel’s… Read More »
In Search of Stupidity, Second Edition Merrill R. Chapman Apress, 2006 This book aims to explain many marketing disasters in the computer software and hardware industries. Chapman covers marketing mistakes of both hardware and software companies. Some of these stories provide insight into the thinking behind the mistake. As an insider at MicroPro, Chapman could… Read More »
Back in September, Mark Dominus wrote a commentary describing his take on Design Patterns. Although I am impressed with a lot of what MJD has written in the past, I wasn’t sure what to make of this one. Ralph Johnson of Design Patterns fame responded and MJD wrote again. I encourage you to read all… Read More »
Practical Development Environments Matthew B. Doar O’Reilly, 2005 Although this is a very good book, it was not exactly what I thought it would be. From the title and the blurb on the back of the book, I thought it would describe some complete development environments that would be worth implementing. Instead, Doar does a… Read More »