Software Exorcism Bill Blunden Apress, 2003 I was really looking forward to this book, having spent a fair number of years maintaining legacy code in different languages and environments. This made the disappointment even more acute when the book did not live up to its subtitle: A Handbook for Debugging and Optimizing Legacy Code. The… Read More »
In the first article of this series, Conversion to Subversion, Part I, I described the problem I found in trying to convert a project from my CVS repository to Subversion. In my last article, Conversion to Subversion: The Project’s Trunk, I described the solution that I used to convert a basic project with no tags… Read More »
In Conversion to Subversion, Part I, I described the problems I found when I began converting my CVS repository to Subversion. In this article, I describe the work and surprises that came from the first project migration. My first idea was to build the repository from the dump file and then fix the result using… Read More »
For about a year now, I’ve been playing with Subversion on small projects. In order to protect my main repository in CVS from my experiments, I just created new projects under Subversion and worked with them there. All of my real projects continued under CVS control. This way if my experiments with Subversion were a… Read More »
Practical Subversion Garrett Rooney Apress, 2005 I have worked with several version control systems over the years. But my system of choice for the last decade has been CVS. For the last year, I’ve been looking at Subversion and I like a lot of what I’ve seen. I’ve read the book Version Control with Subversion,… Read More »
Of all of the lessons I have learned doing software development, one of the most important was to recognize what kind of problem I’m trying to solve. This sounds pretty trivial, but I’m not talking about the categorization you are probably thinking of. As software professionals, we tend to look at all problems as solvable.… Read More »
Back in September, I talked a bit about The One, Right Place and what a useful concept it is. I’m now reading the second edition of Code Complete and ran across this concept once again. More importantly, McConnell references the book where I first read about the concept: Programming on Purpose: Essays on Software Design.… Read More »
I find that I have a different viewpoint about programming languages than many programmers I’ve met. I feel that a programming language embodies three different things: a tool for solving problems an approach to thinking about solutions a notation I don’t believe that there is any language that is the best or most powerful in… Read More »
Hackers & Painters Paul Graham O’Reilly, 2004 I was really looking forward to reading this book. I had read a few of Graham’s essays in the past and found his ideas to be thought-provoking. I expected some to find more of the same. Instead, this book ranged over a lot of topics, not all of… Read More »
This is a very simple concept that seems to escape many people. In fact, most of the multi-threaded code I’ve seen shows a distinct misunderstanding of this basic fact. Very often people seem to think that a mutex should protect a section of code. I think this misconception may have been caused by the term… Read More »