books

Frederick P. Brooks. Addison-Wesley, 1975, ISBN 0-201-00650-2.

The classic book on the human elements of software engineering. Software tools and development environments may have changed in the 21 years since the first edition of this book, but the peculiarly nonlinear economies of scale in collaborative work and the nature of individuals and groups has not changed an epsilon. If you write code or depend upon those who do, get this book as soon as possible. You (and/or your colleagues) will be forever grateful.

This book has been mentioned in the following pages of the Jargon File: Brooks's Law, second-system effect.

Tracy Kidder. Avon. Copyright © 1982. ISBN 0-380-59931-7.

This book (a 1982 Pulitzer Prize winner) documents the adventure of the design of a new Data General computer, the MV-8000 Eagle. It is an amazingly well-done portrait of the hacker mindset — although largely the hardware hacker — done by a complete outsider. It is a bit thin in spots, but with enough technical information to be entertaining to the serious hacker while providing non-technical people a view of what day-to-day life can be like — the fun, the excitement, the disasters. During one period, when the microcode and logic were glitching at the nanosecond level, one of the overworked engineers departed the company, leaving behind a note on his terminal as his letter of resignation: “I am going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.”

This book has been mentioned in the following pages of the Jargon File: Bibliography.

James Geoffrey. Infobooks. Copyright © 1987. ISBN 0-931137-07-1.

This gentle, funny spoof of the Tao Te Ching contains much that is illuminating about the hacker way of thought. “When you have learned to snatch the error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave.”

This book has been mentioned in the following pages of the Jargon File: Bibliography.