Software Engineering discussion

Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How they Think (Oram & Wilson)

Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction (McConnell)

The Mythical Man-Month (Brooks)

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master (Hunt & Thomas)

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software (Rosenberg)

The Practice of Programming (Kernighan & Pike)

David Patterson led an effort in 2006 for the ACM to find the top 25 classic computer science books. The one page article is here:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~pattrsn/A...

Yet another list, and an interesting methodology used to generate it.

Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books, Ever

http://www.noop.nl/2008/06/top-100-be...

So many books, so little time (Anon).

Two suggestions:

1. The New Turing Omnibus 66 Excursions in Computer Science. by A.K. Dewdney

2. Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. by Bruce Tate (Pragmatic Bookshelf Series)

I have #1... great suggestion. I will check out #2. Thanks!

A couple more suggestions, both by Douglas Hofstadter:

3. Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
4. Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.

Also, an update to the 7 Lang/7 Weeks book: I see it is still in beta. So we might plunge in and provide critiques to the author or wait until it is completed.

GEB is one of my all time favorites. Total genius.

You might check out Hofstadter's "I am a Strange Loop", if you have not already seen it. It is beyond the scope of this group, but if you are interested in consciousness, he talks about how it could be bootstrapped from nothingness. He says that he is trying to fix the fact that GEB was well received, but most people didn't get the point of it. It, however, isn't his most well-written work, and he was also dealing with his wife's death at the time, which both adds and subtracts from the content.

I will take a look at "Strange Loop" By the review on Amazon I worry that in reading it I will either not understand the concepts or scream out like the Andrew, Robin William's character in "Bicentennial Man", "I SAW the Inner ME!"

Just got my copy of Masterminds last night (and Strange Loops). I read the BASIC chapter and will add some comments in the next few days. Then try to jump in where you are at. Most of the languages in the book I have never used. A couple only minimally. Too bad they didn't include Prolog. I used that one for 20 years on-and-off.

In about 2 weeks (mid-June), I would like to make our next book selection for July-August. In order to get some feedback, I am going to launch a poll asking you to vote on one of four selections. I will let the poll run until June 15, and reveal the results then. I might deviate from the strict poll results, so if you have some thoughts on the selections post them in this thread so that I can consider any comments as well. Everyone is welcome to vote, regardless of whether or not you are affiliated with UST.

MIT has Open-Course-Ware that follows books and topics. An alternate format could be to follow MIT OCW. Going through the material feels like auditing a class.

Example:
An undergrad class with "Godel, Escher, Bach" as it's text:
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/special-pr...

I found about 8 hours of MIT video lecture on GEB too. The videos were great - entertaining and educational.

You can search the web for "MIT OCW", and MIT's OCW root web page is: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses

Erik, this is a great resource and suggestion.

I will probably tee-up GEB in the poll on the next cycle and test the member appetite. I am a little concerned about the length (or more accurately, the big intellectual commitment) and that it tips a little too far to the computer science side (not necessarily a bad thing once in a while)... this is why I left it off for this round.

I'd like to second "Mythical Man-Month" as our next selection.

Brooks just released his "follow-up" several months ago: "The Design of Design." It looks like a complementary read - though more complex than his first.

Covers both theory and practice of design in great detail - beyond any other treatment I've seen so far.

Maybe we could approach Brook's latest after digesting his first.

"Hackers" by Steven Levy is another future possibility. It has been reissued in a 25th anniversary edition.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/06/hack...

I think the poll has stabilized to a pretty clear preference, so the July/August selection will be Beautiful Code. I will setup a topic for it in a few weeks. Here are the poll results:

----------

What book selection would you prefer for the July-August time frame?

* Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think (Oram & Wilson) 7 votes 58.3%

The Mythical Man-Month (Brooks) 3 votes 25.0%

The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (Raymond) 2 votes 16.7%

The New Turing Omnibus: 66 Excursions in Computer Science (Dewdney) 0 votes 0.0%

Brad wrote: "I think the poll has stabilized to a pretty clear preference, so the July/August selection will be Beautiful Code."

For those who are ACM members, the slice of Safari Books Online (http://pd.acm.org/) that ACM makes available to members currently includes Beautiful Code.

Tomorrow, I will launch another poll with four choices for our September-October selection. It will run for two weeks, so I will announce the new selection in mid-August.

An interesting course, some interesting books.

Philosophy and Theoretical Computer Science

https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/fa...

Brad, can you please recommend any Hadoop or NoSQL books? I hear these two become popular and get good reviews on Amazon.com

http://pragprog.com/book/rwdata/seven...

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/97805...

You picked two excellent books, and I would start with these, in the order you listed them. Note that the Hadoop book just came out in its 3rd edition.