The Third Bit

Our Summer of Code podcast is now up on the web — thanks to Leslie Hawthorn and the other folks at Google for everything.

Beautiful Code, DrProject

Jon Udell just posted some comments on Beautiful Code, in which he says:

…as I’ve been reading it I’m struck once again by the theme of narrating the work. Of the chapters I’ve read so far, three are especially vivid examples of that: Karl Fogel’s exegesis of the stream-oriented interface used in Subversion to convey changes across the network, Alberto Savoia’s meditation on the process of software testing, and Lincoln Stein’s sketches (”code stories”) that he writes for himself as he develops a new bioinformatics module.

Although this is a book by programmers and for programmers, the method of narrating the work process is, in principle, much more widely applicable. In practice, it’s something that’s especially easy and natural for programmers to do.

I hadn’t run across the phrase “narrating the work” before, but it’s an apt description of what developers really want in high-level documentation: a story that will lead them into the heart of the code, so that they can understand its view of the world.  It also explains why such documentation is so rare: telling stories well is a difficult art.

Beautiful Code

http://beautifulcode.oreillynet.com/ — look forward to seeing you all there.

Beautiful Code

Today’s Amazon stats: Beautiful Code is #244 in books, #4 in computing, and #1 in both programming and software.

Beautiful Code

CRAP is “Change Risk Analysis and Predictions”, and it’s the subject of Alberto Savoia’s latest Artima posting. (Alberto wrote about testing for Beautiful Code.)

Beautiful Code

Beautiful Code now has its own blog, managed by Michael Feathers (author of Working Effectively with Legacy Code, which is one of my favorite programming books).  If you’d like to contribute, we’d like to hear from you.

Beautiful Code, Books

If you’d rather buy it by the chapter, Beautiful Code is now available on Safari.

Beautiful Code, Books

Matt Doar (author of one of my favorite recent books) has written a very nice review of Beautiful Code.  Thanks, Mike…   If you spot any others, I’d be grateful for links.

Beautiful Code, Books

Bryan Cantrill, one of the contributors to Beautiful Code, has blogged about the possibility of stack overflow in the regular expression code written by Rob Pike that was the subject of Brian Kernighan’s chapter. It’s fun to read; I’m looking forward to more crosstalk of this kind.

Beautiful Code, Books

C’mon, folks, we’re still only in the number three spot for new programming books on Amazon, behind books on Photoshop and ActionScript. Remember, all the royalties go to a good cause, so by bumping us up to #1, you’re helping to make the world a better place

Beautiful Code, Books