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Title: Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
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Manufacturer: Three Rivers Press
List Price: $13.95
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| Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Three Rivers Press A pleasure to read | | Setting aside, for a moment, that the content of this book is interesting and helpful to programmers and non-programmers in understanding the trials and tribulations of software development, the main thing about this book that struck me is how very very nice it is to read on the Kindle. I've discovered that presentation and formatting still matter a good deal in electronic books, and Dreaming in Code does it right. It's a page-turner for the digital age, my bedtime story after a long day of bit-banging and code-monkeying. | | Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Three Rivers Press Twice as long as it has to be. | Creating software is hard.
That's the message Scott Rosenberg brings us.
Anyone who has written code or managed a software project or, for that matter, been involved with an install of new software product.
The problem is that Rosenberg has written an essentially boring book about an exciting subject (if you get excited about subjects like software development). For his subject, Rosenberg picked an open source development named Chandler. Bad choice for several reasons. First, Chandler was the brainchild of Mitch Kapor, the very wealthy co-founder of Lotus Development, the creators of the legendary 1-2-3 spreadsheet package. A much lesser known product was Agenda, the demise of which outlining and scheduling freaks still cry over. (Another product, Ecco, was better and it too died in the market.)
Why was this a bad choice for Rosenberg? Because Chandler was mostly funded by Kapor. Because Kapor was essentially the bossman of the project, deciding major design objectives.
So what we wind up with is a tediously long interview with Kapor over the several years Rosenberg observed the development of Chandler, which by the way, is still in development. The possibly revolutionary ideas contained in Chandler aren't quite so novel these days.
Rosenberg is consciously emulating Tracy Kidder, whose The Soul of a New Machineis a classic. But in "Soul of a New Machine" and the almost as good SHOW STOPPER! CLOTH : THE BREAKNECK RACE TO CREATE WINDOWS NT AND THE NEXT GENERATION AT MICROSOFT, great tension is created by the need to get the product to market. There is no such tension here because Chandler is an open source product that will be distributed free.
The lack of a market motive and the control of one man simply robs the story of any vigor or tension.
Too bad because Rosenberg does tell a good story that's buried beneath the narrative of the non-story and that is that developing software is very hard work and no one has really figured out how to do it consistently. Of course no one has figured out how to make recordsetting box office movies consistently either or bestselling novels.
Rosenberg has done his homework on software development and the pain and agony thereof. Unfortunately, he subjects his audience to the pain and development of Chandler. The Chandler development story is not entirely uninteresting, but it could have been told in a lot fewer pages.
Overall, this is a book that people in the industry may enjoy for its "I told you that software development is hard work!" quality. But, on the whole, I don't think it will appeal to a wider audience - which is truly very sad. The average person doesn't appreciate what an act of genius functioning software is. Yes, anyone can learn to write the classic "Hello, World!" program in a few minutes. But building something complex is an enormous undertaking and we should be glad that such platforms and applications work at all.
This is the story that Rosenberg was obviously hoping to tell and it really is a pity that he failed. Still, "Dreaming In Code" is a decent read, though I would suggest only for those in the industry. And even they will be skimming pages after about the first third of the book.
Jerry | | Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Three Rivers Press As unfocused as Chandler | | I thought I would love this book since I like computers and software. But I quit reading about a third of the way through. It goes on and on about nothing at all. It should have been a long magazine article. This is poor story telling. | | Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Three Rivers Press unsure of the target audience | I am a professional developer and I'm unsure exactly who Scott Rosenberg expected to read his book. Computer science people? A general audience of tech fans? I felt bad that he picked a project that wandered around and never reached completion before he had to bail out and deliver a manuscript. Even now in early 2008, the Chandler team announced it would scale back to 10 full-time staff as it tried to get a true product out the door and live on. If we commercial software developers took so long to release something, we would have gone out of business or had been canned by then.
Mitch Kapor and the Chandler project seem to be a logical choice, with a famous leader, an open source / foundation project that should be more open to a reporter than a proprietary project, and a hot topic area within the web that people can comprehend at some level. Of course, the problem is that the project has some exception talent and some great ideas, yet cannot deliver. To this reader, some of the problems described were interesting and clearly hard to solve. Unfortunately, the people themselves did not come across as particularly interesting. Their portraits, from Kapor on down, rarely came to life, which didn't add as much narrative drive that might make me want to root for their success.
Outside of the main thread with the play-by-play on Chandler itself, the book is a series of diversions on software development, organizational dynamics, Fred Brooks, the open source gang, extreme programming, and more. Rosenberg actually does pretty well at capturing their essence, and his writing is certainly adequate. For me, there was little new, as those were familiar conflicts and history. Maybe that's because of what may be the primary conclusion of the book: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
3.5 stars | | Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Three Rivers Press Drifting in Dreaming in Code |
I think this book could be enjoyed by many more people than those
it will obviously appeal to. It tells the story of the life of a
particular, medium sized project. The project is typical in some
ways and unusual in others, just like most projects.
It is easy to complain that Rosenberg wanders off the subject. He
certainly does. We can rationalize that he is demonstrating how
the project wandered off course. But the digressions are entertaining;
they are well written and tell an enjoyable story.
There is even some material about programming, or computer science.
He got it better than most authors that are not professional
programmers. But be careful. Several times I got the feeling "that's
not exactly right, but it's close enough for the intended audience."
There are extensive end notes documenting statements in the text.
Instead of note numbers, each note begins with a phrase quoted from
the main text. This avoids cluttering the body of the text with
note numbers, but makes it hard to go from a note to the reason
for the note. Most readers will ignore the notes. They are not
necessary for most readers. This book is not an extended argument
that needs proof for each step. If you enjoy the book you might
find it fun to browse in the notes and follow some of the references.
Many lead to educational and fun web sites.
| | Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Three Rivers Press Product Description | Our civilization runs on software. Yet the art of creating it continues to be a dark mystery, even to the experts. To find out why it’s so hard to bend computers to our will, Scott Rosenberg spent three years following a team of maverick software developers—led by Lotus 1-2-3 creator Mitch Kapor—designing a novel personal information manager meant to challenge market leader Microsoft Outlook. Their story takes us through a maze of abrupt
dead ends and exhilarating breakthroughs as they wrestle not only with the abstraction of code, but with the unpredictability of human behavior— especially their own. | | Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Three Rivers Press Amazon.com | | In the 80s, Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine attempted to define the story of the development of a minicomputer: from the new science to the business and nascent culture of electronic hardware and software that was characteristic of that time. Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming in Code draws on Kidder's model as it attempts to document the state of software, the Internet, and everything circa 2006 through the lens of Chandler, an as-yet-unfinished software application for the management of personal information. The Chandler project--driven by Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development and main author of its 1-2-3 spreadsheet, and later co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation--isn't the primary point of Dreaming in Code, though reading about software people and their social behavior is at least as interesting as reading about that of meerkats or monkeys. Rather, Chandler is a rhetorical device with which Rosenberg takes on the big questions: How do software development teams work (or not)? Why does the reuse of software modules rarely work altogether correctly? Does open-source development by volunteers on the Internet lead to innovation or just insanely bifurcated chaos? Chandler helps his readers think more clearly about all of these issues; however, "answers" to these questions are, of course, not to be had, which is one of his points. The problem with books about technical subjects that aspire to appeal to a general audience, particularly computers and software, is that such subjects are so far outside the realm of familiarity of most people that the prose bogs down in analogy and metaphor. Rosenberg manages to avoid too much of that and deliver a readable account of software development and culture. --David Wall |
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