Over the years, I have come to the amusing realization that many people feel like they could program if they just tried. You know the type. He (or she) has used computers for a while. He picked up Computer Programming for Total Morons or Object Oriented Programming in C++ and Java in an Hour and… Read More »
Perl Best Practices Damian Conway O’Reilly, 2005 This book is hard to summarize. There is much good advice in this book. Unfortunately, there’s also some advice that I found questionable. Conway covers some of important Perl programming and general programming best practices, including consistent formatting, use of strict and warnings, and the use of version… Read More »
When I was getting my EE degree many years ago, one of my professors (Dr. Dave) had an interesting lecture on the difference between accuracy and precision. Even though many people use these terms interchangeably, they are separate concepts. Possibly the most important point of separating these two concepts is remembering that they may be… Read More »
Waltzing with Bears Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister Dorset House Publishing, 2003 The authors of Peopleware are back to tackle the topic of risk management. Given their earlier works, you would expect DeMarco and Lister to provide good insights into the topic and clear explanations. In that, you will not be disappointed with this book.… Read More »
Every now and then, I manage to pull myself away from reading and reviewing computer books (my hobby for the last year) or programming (my hobby for … never mind), and spend a little time on various weblogs. It’s important to see what the names in the field are thinking and talking about. During one… Read More »
Secure Coding in C and C++ Robert C. Seacord Addison-Wesley, 2006 One very real problem in software today is the rise in security exploits of one kind or another. Gone are the days when we can just assume that no user of our software will try to break it, or use the software to compromise… Read More »
One of the problems with being a software developer these days is company Intellectual Property agreements. I understand that companies want to protect the time, money, and expertise that they have invested. But some of the agreements I have seen go way past reasonable concern. Some IP agreements take the position that any programming a… Read More »
In the book Software Exorcism, Bill Blunden described a problem caused by the maintenance programmer not usually being the same person as the programmer who wrote the code. Often the maintenance programmer comes in with a less-than-complete understanding of the original problem or of the design decisions made for this problem. Usually, there are also… Read More »
Perl Testing: A Developer’s Notebook Ian Langworth and chromatic O’Reilly, 2005 This is the first book I have read from the new O’Reilly Developer’s Notebook series. Although the style of these books probably won’t work for every topic, it works particularly well for a book on testing. Each chapter is organized as a set of… Read More »
In the previous four articles in my Unintuitive Multithreading series, I focused mostly on design of a multi-threaded application. This time, I plan to cover a few techniques that I have found helpful in troubleshooting multi-threaded applications. To some extent, the normal techniques you have used for troubleshooting will work in a multi-threaded program. But,… Read More »