Programming Pearls, Second Edition Jon Bentley ACM Press, Addison-Wesley, 2000 One of my favorite programming books of all time now has a second edition. I’ve got to say it’s as good as the original. Many years ago, I stumbled across Jon Bentley’s Programming Pearls. It is a great book on programming. It did not focus… Read More »
George A. Miller’s paper The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information discussed some limits of the human brain with respect to information processing. In particular, his research had found that people are unable to keep up with more than 5-9 different chunks of information at a… Read More »
Peopleware Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister Dorset House Publishing Co., 1987 If you are a manager trying to get better work out of your programming staff, you need to read this book. If you are a project lead trying to be determine how to make your team more effective, you need to read this book.… Read More »
Almost fifteen years ago, I stumbled across the concept of version control in the form of RCS. I wasn’t real sure that this tool was going to be useful for me. After all, it required more work that did not contribute directly to producing code. In order to try it out, I began using RCS… Read More »
Randomness Deborah J. Bennett Harvard University Press, 1998 This book covers the subjects of randomness, probability, and statistics better than any other book for the layman I’ve ever seen. As a programmer, most of the books I’ve read on these topics are either heavily into the math and theory of the subject or focused on… Read More »
I’ve already written some of my ideas about paradigms, but the most important point still remains. I maintain that the real benefit of a paradigm is not the way of thinking that it defines, but the contrast between this way of thinking and others. Almost every programmer I’ve ever met that only knows one paradigm… Read More »
And just to prove that some ideas appear in many places all at once, Andy Lester explores naming again in O’Reilly Network: The world’s two worst variable names [Mar. 07, 2004]. Apparently, Lester is reviewing the second edition of Code Complete, one of my favorite books on programming, and says there is an entire chapter… Read More »
Perl for Web Site Management John Callender O’Reilly, 2002 This book may be one of the best books I’ve ever seen for getting the Perl programming language used in a place where it is sorely needed. Many people developing web-based applications are not programmers. They learned to use some HTML authoring tool and progressed from… Read More »
Modern C++ Design Andrei Alexandrescu Addison-Wesley, 2001 This book just blew me away. I’ve had access to compile-time programming in other languages and had worked pretty hard to understand templates. I felt I had a better than average grasp of how C++ templates work and are used. The techniques in this book were astounding. I… Read More »
The Logic of Failure Dietrich Döner Perseus Books, 1996 This is a spectacular book on why people make mistakes. This book gives wonderful insight into design and troubleshooting that you won’t get from any traditional book on programming. A large portion of the book describes how very intelligent people make what seem like blindingly stupid… Read More »