Hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas. I'm on vacation until January 3rd and
I'm taking time to relax and read a ton of books my wife bought me from my
Amazon wish list. I've already finished a couple of them...
Head First Design Patterns
Loved it. Probably one of the best written technical books I've ever seen. I
have of course read the classic GoF
Design Patterns book. Comparatively, the authors of Head First Design
Patterns did such a great job of making analogies and writing with a
conversational and entertaining style that you can't help but love the book. The
examples are written in Java and any C# developer can easily follow along. A
very high rating from me.
Testing Computer Software
This one was on Joel Spolsky's Fog Creek Training Management Program
reading list. I decided to pick up a copy and I've been reading it in chunks
over the last several weeks. However, since I finished it today it goes on my
Christmas book list. No doubt it is a good book, however I was not terribly
enthusiastic about it. It was geared towards black box testing and didn't really
focus heavily on testing techniques. However, it did provide a lot of great
background in terms of testing management and how to cope with political issues.
Not a high rating for me.
The Mythical Man-Month
I'm not finished yet, however the second essay alone is worth the price of
the book! I can't tell you how many managers I've met that are under the false
assumption that adding developers to a project shortens the timeline
significantly. Another self-imposed fallacy is optimism - programmers assume
that the tasks the set out to accomplish will take "as long as they aught to
take" when in fact we don't live life in a vacuum. A few of my favorite quotes:
Cost does indeed vary as the product of the number of men and number
of months. Progress does not. Hence the man-month as a unit for measuring
the size of a job is a dangerous and deceptive myth. It implies that men and
months are interchangeable...More software projects have gone awry for lack
of calendar time than for all other causes combined.
Adding more manpower to a late software project makes it later.
I'll be reading essays from The Mythical Man-Month over time. The next book
I'm moving on to this evening is
The C++ Programming Language 3rd Edition by
Bjarne Stroustrup!
If you've been following my blog, you might already know that
C++ was once my favorite programming language. I felt the need to brush up
and learn more about it since I live in the C# world these days. It's great being a geek on vacation. :-)
