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 »
Beyond the C++ Standard Library Bjorn Karlsson Addison-Wesley, 2006 If you’ve been programming in C++ in the past few years you’ve probably heard of the Boost library. Boost is a large peer-reviewed set of classes and libraries designed to augment the C++ standard library. Beyond the C++ Standard Library serves as an introduction to some… Read More »
I’ve been seeing a lot of comments in various forums similar to this comment by Christopher Diggins: XML down a slippery slope. In most of them, there is the implied belief that XML is the solution to all problems and that anything that violates the spirit of XML is to be condemned. I have personally… Read More »
Code Reading Diomidis Spinellis Addison-Wesley, 2003 I have had this book on my list of books to read for some time. Although I have been reading code for years, everything I had heard about this book suggested that it would help improve my reading skills. Unfortunately, halfway through the book I was mostly disappointed. This… Read More »