Not on the Shelves

Please see the 2024 edition of this page for my current list of unwritten books.

From the introduction to the first version:

I was watching Field of Dreams a couple of nights ago. When the ghostly voice whispered, “If you build it, they will come,” I thought, “That’s it! If I write reviews of the books I’d most like to read, maybe someone will write the books!”

As I was nursing my hangover the next morning I explained my plan to a friend. She took the icepack off her forehead long enough to explain sympathetic magic to me. According to her, there’s a tribe whose land is occasionally stricken by drought. When the rain fails, the elders plow the soil anyway in the hope that doing so will force the rain to come.

After reviewing dozens of computer-related books, I’d happily sacrifice a rooster to get someone to write something different. I’m constantly amazed by how few books there actually are: my local bookstore has eight shelves of Java books, but if you did a set-union on their contents, you’d be left with only two or three. What’s worse, a lot of things I really want to know wouldn’t be there at all.

These reviews are my attempt to point out the gaps in the computing literature, and indirectly, the gaps in most programmers’ education (including my own). Over the years, they have inspired Beautiful Code, Making Software, The Architecture of Open Source Applications, Research Software Engineering with Python, and the JavaScript and Python versions of Software Design by Example. If you know of other books that match these descriptions, please give me a shout; if you’d like to write one, please get in touch as well—I’d be happy to help if I can.

2024

2019

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2009

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1997