book

Dissecting code

Wednesday, January 5th, 2005 | Personal | No Comments

Guess this being out cold after the tonsillectomy (or however you spell that) has a few benefits, basically I get to read a lot.

Just finished reading Dissecting a C# Application: Inside Sharpdevelop as I hoped it would provide an ample amount of information on why they chose the design they did, what prompted which things, etc. Now, it does this… to some degree, but it mainly reads as an in-depth guide to the SharpDevelop source code (I suppose I should’ve guessed that from the title, huh?). So while it probably is an extremely interesting book to read if you want to hack the innards of SharpDevelop, it isn’t particularly interesting to read if you want to look at how they designed things. The interesting bits are largely obscured by long and tedious code listings from the IDE.

What little there is to glean from it of design evolution thoughts can largely be picked up in the first few chapters. Otherwise, single chapters might seem interesting if you’re looking at implementing the same thing yourself. For me, the most useful thing in the book was links to a couple of websites with interesting out-of-print books.

So, if you have time to spare, or want to hack around SharpDevelop, then take a look, otherwise pass this book by.

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Chipping away on a program

Tuesday, January 4th, 2005 | Development | No Comments

… or Refactoring: Improving the design of existing code. With refactoring being the buzzword of the day who can afford not to take a gander at the promised land?

Now that may seem like a rather biased introduction, that was indeed what I was going for, however, I have used refactoring for a while, but I have never looked at any literary works on the matter and I thought it was time to pick up Fowler’s book. While it displays a lot of different methods for refactoring I can’t help having the feeling of being talked down to all the way through the book. It is as if Fowler and Beck (who in parts co-authored chapters) have this condescending notion of yeah, yeah, you might have your fancy design model, but this is how software really survives.

While refactoring may provide the means to extend the longevity of your code, I find the picture they paint is overly pink. They are enamoured by their own techniques, fair enough. I guess I just look for more objectivity in books.

All that said then if you are developing object-oriented programs in this day and age you should read the book, if nothing else to see how the refactoring craze started.

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Sojourning the planets

Monday, December 27th, 2004 | Personal | No Comments

I just finished reading Sojourner: An Insider’s View of the Mars Pathfinder Mission by Andrew Mishkin – a telltale of the efforts to get the little rover, Sojourner, to the face of Mars. An intriguing tale of problem-solving, natural sciences humour and intrigues of the workplace.

Albeit the story starts out a bit messy it all comes together well and particularly the second part (of three) of the book is fascinating: the problem solving of the actual rover – designing it, troubleshooting it and all the other fun engineering puzzles you play with when developing something.

It is altogether a book to enjoy… if you are into the natural sciences, of course. Readers from other fields can probably read it as a fascinating adventure, but many of the – this is how we got around this problem – will not be terribly interesting to those.

So, pick it up if you get a chance.

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