I am proud to announce that Dreaming in Code is now in its third printing.
No, it’s not on any bestseller lists. (That I know of!) As a hit, it is of the slow-burn kind. But it’s selling well enough to give me a gentle feeling of vindication towards those observers who, at various stages of the project, doubted that a detailed chronicle of a software project with no world-changing heroic outcome or billion-dollar payoff could attract many more readers than you could count on the fingers of one RSI-addled hand.
Like any introspective and at least marginally neurotic writer, I of course had a voice in my own head saying similar things. So it gives me some calm satisfaction to note the book’s success and to continue to read the generous flow of comments, kudos and criticisms flowing back at me from the blogosphere and the media.
In recent coverage, Glenn Fleishman (in the Seattle Times) said that — since I ended up “adrift with an intrepid crew, a host of dogs and an ample food supply” yet found that “After three years, no land was in sight” — I should be humming the Gilligan’s Island theme. (Okay, but only in one of the punk cover versions!)
In the Chicago Tribune, Mark Coatney said that “Rosenberg clearly knows what he’s talking about and knows how to tell a story.”
Still, my favorite pro-media review to date appeared in the Irish Times (alas, behind a pay wall) — perhaps because, despite the mainstream venue, the author is the estimable geekographer Danny O’Brien, creator of the NTK newsletter, progenitor of the Life Hacks movement and (I think) currently a staffer at the EFF. Here’s a bit of the review:
Books like Rosenberg’s do a great job at allowing us to step away from the keyboard and see our foibles as others might see them. His skill in portrayal lies not just in explaining the tribulations of the software project to the layman, it also lies in explaining them afresh to the seasoned — and therefore oblivious — hacker.
His mastery in picking just the right metaphor to pull an obscure coding controversy into the common world is unparalleled: I’ve never seen the difference between software’s “back-end” and “front-end” portrayed better than in Rosenberg’s analogy between the incomprehensible R2D2 and its fey, deferential interpreter, C3PO.
But even more impressive (at least, to me) is his ability to uncover anecdotes and connections that even the most oversurfing geek would not have heard. Even for me, an obsessive follower of the trivia of tech culture, there were genuine surprises in every chapter…
…It’s perhaps forgivable that such great literature on programming should happen so rarely: the mix of tech skills, explanatory abilities, and sheer determination to trail and document what from the outside looks as exciting as an accountant’s meditation retreat, is rare among writers of Rosenberg’s calibre. But we badly need those books to be written.
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