Books

There are two kinds of book that you leave in the bathroom. The first is a type of comedy book, such as The Alphabet of Manliness, or Is it just me or is everything Shit?. These are great because you can pick them up, flick through them for a quick laugh and put them down again without bothering to use a bookmark. The other type of book is the one that you leave there just in case you ever run out of toilet paper. Thanks to my so-called mate Dave, thats the type of book I've just wasted 5 days reading. He did warn me, but he left the book in my house knowing I'd read it anyways.

I've always wanted to be able to design simple things such as application forms, home pages, cover sheets etc without embarassing myself. I find decent design very tough, I can do simple stuff, and I know that in most cases less is more, but I still struggle until someone else comes along and makes half the text flush right, adds an arrow and voila, it looks good.

So I bought this book...

Alright, time for another book review. This post will be discussing Pauls Grahams book, Hackers and Painters. Paul Graham is a rich man, famous for an impressive start up company (Viaweb) and some outrageous and offensive quotes such as... The programmers you'll be able to hire to work on a Java project won't be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python. and another classic At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don't. Paul Graham is another famous programming blogger and this book is a mixture of the best of his articles online, plus extra content derived from speeches he has given in the past. So what do I make of it?

I have just finished reading a book compiled, edited and introduced by Joel Spolsky and released by Apress. "The Best Software Writing I" is a collection of some of the best articles on software development, and management written on various weblogs over the past few years. Joel expects it to become a frequent enough release, so it should be a series worth looking out for.

Borrowed from brevity.org, here is a list of all the articles you will find in the book. I am presuming that since these originated on the web, and are still available that I amn't infringing anyones rights by linking to them.

• Ken Arnold - Style Is Substance
• Leon Bambrick - Award for the Silliest User Interface: Windows Search
• Michael Bean - The Pitfalls of Outsourcing Programmers
• Rory Blyth - Excel as a Database
• Adam Bosworth - ICSOC04 Talk
• danah boyd - Autistic Social Software
• Raymond Chen - Why Not Just Block the Apps That Rely on Undocumented Behavior?
• Kevin Cheng and Tom Chi - Kicking the Llama
• Cory Doctorow - Save Canada's Internet from WIPO
• ea_spouse - EA: The Human Story
• Bruce Eckel - Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing
• Paul Ford - Processing Processing
• Paul Graham - Great Hackers
• John Gruber - The Location Field is the New Command Line
• Gregor Hohpe - Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit
• Ron Jeffries - Passion
• Eric Johnson - C++ -- The Forgotten Trojan Horse
• Eric Lippert - How Many Microsoft Employees Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb?
• Michael "Rands" Lopp - What to do when you're screwed
• Larry Osterman - Larry's Rules of Software Engineering #2: Measuring Testers by Test Metrics Doesn't
• Mary Poppendieck - Team Compensation (pdf)
• Rick Schaut - Mac Word 6.0
• Clay Shirky - A Group is its Own Worst Enemy
• Clay Shirky - Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software
• Eric Sink - Closing the Gap Part 1, Part 2
• Eric Sink - Hazards of Hiring
• Aaron Swartz - PowerPoint Remix
• why the lucky stiff - A Quick (and Hopefully Painless) Ride Through Ruby (with Cartoon Foxes)

There are some very good articles in there, and some very funny ones. If you're not the sort of person who reads books, then at least grab a couple of the titles above that interest you and scroll through them. There really is some good stuff there.

Also, I have realised that some of my non-nerd friends read this blog, so for those I would recommend the two cartoon articles, "Award for the Silliest User Interface ", and "Excel as a database", as the "jokes" there can be understood by anyone.

For the nerds/developers I'd recommend "Great Hackers" by Paul Graham, and "Starbucks Does Not Use 2-Phase Commit". They are both pretty insightful. Also, if you read and enjoyed this book, then Joels other software book "Joel On Software" is a must read.

Finally, for anyone who intends to release software through the web (either commercial, or GPLed) please read "Closing the Gap 2", as it hits the nail on the head. Think about it this way: If getfirefox.com required you to fill out a registration form, or provide an email address before you could download the browser would it still have reached 25 million downloads? Doubtful.

In closing, www.bookpool.com are offering 50% off Apress books, which is well worth looking into. (Thats where I recommend you purchase this book, Click on the image to be taken there) Also, another handy link is The 46 Best Ever Free Utilities for Windows)