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.
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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It’s not that–it’s that I haven’t read it. Your review did ring my bell, and book is on my list.
I suppose you already know about Joel’s “Reading List.”
That’s cool. I’m going to try to keep these posts well-organized and accessible so you could add your thoughts any time. Reading first is always nice :-)
Yes, Joel’s “Reading List” is useful, but it’s a little more heavily into the details of hands-on programming and management than I’m likely to go, and as far as I can recall, it’s a list of books, and a discussion about what books should be on the list, but not actual discussions of the books themselves…
I tried to read “The Mythical Man-Month”, but I didn’t have enough time this week. Short does have certain virtues.
A week turn-around is a little short for me. I’d love to be involved with an online reading group, but a book a month is more like the rate I could manage to keep up with. Plus a week isn’t a whole lot of time for discussion.
Thanks for that feedback. I can certainly see where a week for a whole book is…optimistic, or unrealistic. On the other hand doing something once a month feels way too infrequent considering how much stuff there is to talk about! What I’m going to do is try to mix up books with shorter articles, and also, as I get my act together, publish a schedule a little farther in advance. And of course just figure that some discussions are going to be more lively than others…
Well, my copy of The Mythical Man-Month (anniversary edition) is 292pp plus notes, references, and an index. You might be better off talking about selected ones of the 19 chapters. Or go to one of Chapters 16, 17, or 18 for discussion. But an open-ended week on the book in general, I dunno …
And of course, I’ve already got Joel’s book.