Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
by Scott Rosenberg
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Book Summary Information
Author: Scott RosenbergEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-02-26
ISBN: 1400082471
Number of pages: 416
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Book Reviews of Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
Book Review: Best behind-the-scenes book since "Hackers"
Summary: 5 Stars
I've not enjoyed a book this much since I read Steven Levy's "Hackers" - the behind-the-scenes stories and discussions are just great. I'm not a programmer by trade, but I dabbled a bit in high school and got some more in-depth training in college, but it wasn't my major... a book like this makes me realize not only the fun I may have missed but also the stress I may have dodged. The book definitely provides the ups and downs of the software development business. I especially enjoyed getting a deeper understanding of the Open Source movement and discovering that it too has its built-in problems and isn't the wonder-tech that some books and articles might try to paint it.
The best part of the book was reading along with each release of Chandler... .4 then .5 then .6... and now I visit the actual website and see that they did make their 1.0 release! The book just made my investigation of the actual product and its support/help/website that much more fun.
Great book! I'd love to see similar books done like this down the line.
Summary of Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
Our civilization runs on software. Yet the art of creating it continues to be a dark mystery, even to the experts. To find out why it's so hard to bend computers to our will, Scott Rosenberg spent three years following a team of maverick software developers-led by Lotus 1-2-3 creator Mitch Kapor-designing a novel personal information manager meant to challenge market leader Microsoft Outlook. Their story takes us through a maze of abruptdead ends and exhilarating breakthroughs as they wrestle not only with the abstraction of code, but with the unpredictability of human behavior- especially their own.
In the 80s, Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine attempted to define the story of the development of a minicomputer: from the new science to the business and nascent culture of electronic hardware and software that was characteristic of that time. Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming in Code draws on Kidder's model as it attempts to document the state of software, the Internet, and everything circa 2006 through the lens of Chandler, an as-yet-unfinished software application for the management of personal information.
The Chandler project--driven by Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development and main author of its 1-2-3 spreadsheet, and later co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation--isn't the primary point of Dreaming in Code, though reading about software people and their social behavior is at least as interesting as reading about that of meerkats or monkeys. Rather, Chandler is a rhetorical device with which Rosenberg takes on the big questions: How do software development teams work (or not)? Why does the reuse of software modules rarely work altogether correctly? Does open-source development by volunteers on the Internet lead to innovation or just insanely bifurcated chaos? Chandler helps his readers think more clearly about all of these issues; however, "answers" to these questions are, of course, not to be had, which is one of his points.
The problem with books about technical subjects that aspire to appeal to a general audience, particularly computers and software, is that such subjects are so far outside the realm of familiarity of most people that the prose bogs down in analogy and metaphor. Rosenberg manages to avoid too much of that and deliver a readable account of software development and culture. --David Wall
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