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acraig5075's review against another edition
4.0
An informative broad overview of software development in general, and using the Chandler software project as a continually running specific example. What I liked most about it is how the author presented the various obtuse and abstract concepts in a non-technical and very accessible way. I also appreciated the intelligent and unbiased approach the author takes on the always contentious subject of the title of software engineer. Good reading for a non-programmer or junior programmer to gain insight into the field.
jhgraber's review
5.0
This is a wonderful read for anyone with an interest in (or better yet love of) programming computers. The author gives an insightful view into why good programs are still so hard to come by, and why programming is still more of an art than engineering. He tells the story in the context of a specific project, but also provides an appropriate historical view of how software engineering has evolved.
tilgovi's review
4.0
The book chronicles Rosenberg's attempt to write about Open Source Software and its drift into an exploration of "software time", or the cycles and trials of software development, as experienced by a fly on the wall at the Open Source Applications Foundation during the development of their productivity software, Chandler. Rosenberg's style is friendly, making this a fairly quick read, and he does a good job of balancing exploration and summary to keep the narrative accessible, yet mildly technical at points. Interesting takeaways about management, morale, product life-cycle, team dynamics, etc. Just when the book seems to begin to wind on like a project off the rails, itself, it wraps up neatly with good perspective.
davidr's review
4.0
I found this book to be fascinating. I learned quite a bit, too, about all the factors that programmers consider when they start a new project. Lots of interesting anecdotes. Also, I found that you can actually download the software that the team developed (and is still developing!) and try it out.
kataboy's review
4.0
Interesting narrative of the mishaps of software projects. The thing that makes me sad is that almost 15 years have passed and nothing has changed. Everybody is continuously chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow... Software does not need to be an artistically crafted piece of poetry that wows your peers. It just needs to work and provide the minimum lovable product. But goldplatting continues to be the norm...
nekokat's review against another edition
3.0
An interesting read, half the story of a typical start-up trainwreck and half a philosophical meditation on why, exactly, "software is hard". Rosenberg takes the time to explain quite a lot about coding and programmer culture in layman's terms -- which is redundant for most programmers, while still being technical enough that I'm not sure, say, my parents would be able to get through it. I think the ideal audience is entrepreneurs and those who find themselves in the position of needing to manage programmers; it would also be a good book to assign undergraduate CS students, since it includes both a readable primer of software engineering methods and a sense of what it means to choose programming as a career.
Five years old as of now (it was published in 2007), so it's charmingly dated in some respects. The book ended on a positive note, but the software project that formed the center of the narrative seems to have quietly vanished off the face of the earth; from a purely literary perspective, I wish someone had written a blog post or some kind of wrap-up to serve as an epilogue.
Five years old as of now (it was published in 2007), so it's charmingly dated in some respects. The book ended on a positive note, but the software project that formed the center of the narrative seems to have quietly vanished off the face of the earth; from a purely literary perspective, I wish someone had written a blog post or some kind of wrap-up to serve as an epilogue.
ericwelch's review against another edition
4.0
As CIO at a small college, I had the distinct unpleasure of signing purchase orders for software license renewals and maintenance contracts. In what other business would you buy a product that costs enormous sums of money, is guaranteed to be flawed, will require frequent and costly upgrades, never lives up to its promises, and requires a team of lawyers to interpret the contract, not to mention days of very expensive training for your staff. Welcome to the world of software.
Rosenberg follows the progress of the development of a software package from idea through development and debugging to end (actually, there is no end and to my knowledge they are still trying to come up with a workable product that may have already been superseded by others.). A major difficulty of development is getting many hundreds of programmers to work together and integrate their work into a cohesive product. Not to mention major resdeisgns in the middle of the project - try that with a bridge. The section on learning how to manage the project is worth the cost of the book. Programmers are well known for spending as much time designing the tools to help them use the tools and to save them time using the tools to work on the project than on the code itself.
"But in much of the business world today there lies, beneath the wide dissatisfaction with how software projects perform, a deeper anxiety—a fear that the root of the problem may lie not in failures of management technique but in the very nature of the people doing the work. To many executives, and even to their coworkers in sales or other parts of a company, programmers often seem to belong to an entirely different species. Communicating with them is frustratingly hard. They fail to respond to applications of the usual reward/punishment stimuli. They are geeks, and they are a problem."
I'm not a programmer, yet I found this book fascinating reading and learning about the dynamics of creating some of these monstrous programs. Vista, anyone?
Similar recommended titles: [b:The Soul of a New Machine|7090|The Soul of a New Machine|Tracy Kidder|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165606419s/7090.jpg|882196] by Tracy Kidder.
OK, I admit it. I'm adding a quote that is very interesting but it also represents my playing around with my clippings file on the Kindle to see how easy it is to save and export quotes, etc. Really easy, as it turns out. This one relates to the difficulty of managing programmers (kind of like herding cats) and much of the reason stems from the attributes (almost an autistic or Asperger's personality -- in fact, there has been an explosion of diagnosed autism in Silicon Valley) of programmers.
"Forty-one percent of the IT professionals surveyed reported being introverted thinkers (combination of introversion and thinking preferences), nearly twice the percentage in the general population. Introverted thinkers often prefer a lone-gun approach to work, often avoiding teams, collaborative efforts, and the training that support such structures. This group is least likely to engage and connect interpersonally with others, and may avoid creating personal bridges of trust and openness with colleagues. . . A lot of people feel that communicating with the information technology professional is just slightly harder than communicating with the dead,” Abby Mackness, an analyst with Booz Allen Hamilton who conducted the Human Dynamics study, joked as she presented its results to a crowd of defense contractor employees and consultants."
Rosenberg follows the progress of the development of a software package from idea through development and debugging to end (actually, there is no end and to my knowledge they are still trying to come up with a workable product that may have already been superseded by others.). A major difficulty of development is getting many hundreds of programmers to work together and integrate their work into a cohesive product. Not to mention major resdeisgns in the middle of the project - try that with a bridge. The section on learning how to manage the project is worth the cost of the book. Programmers are well known for spending as much time designing the tools to help them use the tools and to save them time using the tools to work on the project than on the code itself.
"But in much of the business world today there lies, beneath the wide dissatisfaction with how software projects perform, a deeper anxiety—a fear that the root of the problem may lie not in failures of management technique but in the very nature of the people doing the work. To many executives, and even to their coworkers in sales or other parts of a company, programmers often seem to belong to an entirely different species. Communicating with them is frustratingly hard. They fail to respond to applications of the usual reward/punishment stimuli. They are geeks, and they are a problem."
I'm not a programmer, yet I found this book fascinating reading and learning about the dynamics of creating some of these monstrous programs. Vista, anyone?
Similar recommended titles: [b:The Soul of a New Machine|7090|The Soul of a New Machine|Tracy Kidder|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165606419s/7090.jpg|882196] by Tracy Kidder.
OK, I admit it. I'm adding a quote that is very interesting but it also represents my playing around with my clippings file on the Kindle to see how easy it is to save and export quotes, etc. Really easy, as it turns out. This one relates to the difficulty of managing programmers (kind of like herding cats) and much of the reason stems from the attributes (almost an autistic or Asperger's personality -- in fact, there has been an explosion of diagnosed autism in Silicon Valley) of programmers.
"Forty-one percent of the IT professionals surveyed reported being introverted thinkers (combination of introversion and thinking preferences), nearly twice the percentage in the general population. Introverted thinkers often prefer a lone-gun approach to work, often avoiding teams, collaborative efforts, and the training that support such structures. This group is least likely to engage and connect interpersonally with others, and may avoid creating personal bridges of trust and openness with colleagues. . . A lot of people feel that communicating with the information technology professional is just slightly harder than communicating with the dead,” Abby Mackness, an analyst with Booz Allen Hamilton who conducted the Human Dynamics study, joked as she presented its results to a crowd of defense contractor employees and consultants."
xaviershay's review against another edition
2.0
Easy read, but this book just frustrated me. I wanted to shout "YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG" throughout the whole thing. It's been half a decade since the events in the book and perhaps we've learned something since then, but I can't stand to watch a project run for 3 years with not much to show. Sure, Rosenberg learns the lessons, giving a diluted history of programming while he's at it, but for a professional programmer they're all old stories. By his own admission he has targeted the book at a wider audience, and as such I didn't find much anything new in it.
And a personal gripe - I really dislike the typical programmer stereotype that this book reinforces.
And a personal gripe - I really dislike the typical programmer stereotype that this book reinforces.
charleshb's review
4.0
I really enjoyed this book. Not only did it address the particular problems of the Chandler project, it covered a lot of the history of software design, development and engineering. Rosenberg did his research. He referenced many of the books, people and methodologies with which I'm familiar such as Fred Brooks and his seminal book The Mythical Man Month, Ward Cunningham and et.al's eXtreme Programming and wikis, Watts Humphrey and his Personal Software Process, and more. If you aren't a software developer, this book will give you a good overview of the profession and it's history. You'll feel the pain, frustration and joys of software developers everywhere and the Chandler team in particular. I highly recommend it.