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 »
I have recently being seeing references online to the concept of Technical Debt. The concept is an attempt to explain to business and management types some of the downside of overly complicated designs, lack of testing infrastructure, and quick-and-dirty code written to meet a deadline. In the past, I’ve had trouble explaining the difficulties working… Read More »
Programming Ruby Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler, and Andy Hunt Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2005. This book has taken me a really long time to finish. It’s not because of the writing. The writing is clear and readable. The material is well-presented and seems to cover the topic well. I don’t see any glaring errors or anything that… Read More »
One of the odd things about programming is that you are writing for two different audiences. One is the dumbest device ever invented (it does exactly what you tell it to do) and the other is a (hopefully) intelligent programmer who will need to read this code later. We spend a fair amount of time… Read More »
Software Estimation Steve McConnell Microsoft Press, 2006 Software Estimation is the latest book on the craft of developing software from Steve McConnell. If you have read any of his earlier books (Code Complete, Rapid Development, or Software Project Survival Guide), you might suspect that the book will contain lots of useful information that is well… Read More »
Like many developers, I’ve been working with XML for many years now. My first XML-based program dates back to within 6 months of the publishing of the XML 1.0 Recommendation by W3C. I’ve already gone through the phases of: XML looks promising, XML is cool, everything in XML, and XML is just another tool XML… Read More »
Higher Order Perl Mark Jason Dominus Morgan Kaufmann, 2005 The simplest thing you can say about MJD’s Higher Order Perl, is that it is not your ordinary, everyday programming book. It is not even your everyday Perl programming book. MJD introduces an approach to programming that will be new to most programmers. Even those who… Read More »
One of the things Java programmers seem to really like to hate in C++ is the concept of operator overloading. I have heard this from many Java programmers and seen it written by others. According to many, operator overloading makes C++ impossible to understand because you can’t tell what a piece of code is doing… Read More »