OK, the response to my invitation to a discussion of The Mythical Man-Month hasn’t been…overwhelming.
Maybe nobody’s read the book. Or those that have done so have nothing to say about it. Or I said too much myself and nobody felt like adding anything. Or everyone’s too busy wondering when Denny Hastert’s going to quit. Or everyone’s too busy writing code to actually stop and think much about writing code. Or everyone’s too busy, period. Or I just haven’t gotten that Slashdot or Digg link yet.
I’m not worried — I figured this Code Reads thing would take time to get rolling.
But I do have a little incentive to offer: Thanks to the kindness of Gary Cornell, the publisher of APress, I’ve got five copies of Joel Spolsky’s excellent The Best Software Writing I to give away to Code Reads participants.
This great collection has 300 pages of entertaining and incisive writing by people like Clay Shirky, Eric Sink, Michael “Rands” Lopp, Paul Ford, Paul Graham, John Gruber, Cory Doctorow, Adam Bosworth, Raymond Chen, danah boyd, Aaron Swartz and many others. Each one of these pieces is worth a discussion in its own right. (Spolsky’s introduction and the full contents list is here.)
I’ll award these books at my discretion to contributors of value — substantive or simply diverting — to Code Reads discussions.
If The Mythical Man-Month didn’t ring your bell, next Monday I’ll be posting something about Edsger Dijkstra’s famous 1968 paper, “Go To Statement Considered Harmful.” Among other things, it has the virtue of being about 1/100th the length of The Mythical Man-Month.
[tags]code reads, best software writing, mythical man month, go to statement considered harmful[/tags]
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