Software Development Books Blog

Some people have asked us, "You've started a book publishing company? Huh? Why would you do that? I thought all the publishers are going out of business." These articles do a great job of describing why we think there is a future for new publishers to succeed by embracing the change happening right now.

Author Ed Yourdon is working on a third edition to his well known book about agonizingly bad software projects, Death March. Mr. Yourdon has also recently wikified one of his classic books, Modern Structured Analysis.

Since our last installment, I've been saving up some links to book reviews, author interviews, and other software development book-related links. Since it's been awhile, I've accumlated a pretty good list, so I'll go through them quickly.

Woz speaks. Nilges says, whussup with that Steve?

Welcome to a new, hopefully regular feature on the developer.* Software Development Books Blog: a compilation of links to reviews of books related to software development. As I find out about, or stumble into, software development book reviews, I'll post them to this blog--most likely with varying frequency. Here is this installments collection of book review links:

Last night I uploaded to the Articles side of developer.* a book excerpt from a recent release from one of our favorite book publishers, the Pragmatic Programmers. The book is called Interface Oriented Design and was written by Ken Pugh, who won a Jolt award last year for his previous book, Prefactoring. On the developer.* web site, we have excerpted part of Chapter 5, "Inheritance and Interfaces."

Given the recent debate sparked by Joel Spolsky's questioning of Ruby's fitness for enterprise production use, and also a some recent comments on this site about "sneaking" Ruby into an environment, it seems worthwhile to mention a new book published by Pragmatic Bookshelf called From Java To Ruby: Things Every Manager Should Know (Amazon), by Bruce Tate, a long time Java supporter and author who has more recently been covering Ruby.

On Ruby blogger Pat Eyler published today an intereview with Hal Fulton, author of The Ruby Way (forthcoming in a new second edition). Whether or not Ruby is of interest to you, if software development books and publishing are, you might find the interview interesting.

developer.* Books (DeveloperDotStar.com) is proud to announce the forthcoming November 2006 publication of Software Creativity 2.0, by software pioneer Robert L. Glass. The release of this updated, expanded, and revised edition will be the culmination of a ten year odyssey for this great book, which started out with disappointing sales for its original publisher and later became an in-demand cult classic. Many consider it a must-read in the software field.

This is the inaugural post to two new developer.* blogs. As I'll describe in a moment, both of these new blogs will have their own dedicated URLs and RSS feeds. Most of the time, posts to these blogs will not show up on the front page of the developer.* Blogs and Discussion sub-site or in the main developer.* Blogs RSS feed. Instead, new posts to these blogs will show up in their own lists on the right side of the main page, on their own home pages, and in their own feeds. This way people can follow these more narrowly focussed blogs separately from the main flow of blogs.

Some links and commentary related to a new Joel on Software essay and a series of posts, including a few related to developer.* Books, about the software book publishing market by Pat Eyler.

Charles Petzold's new book, Applications = Code + Markup: A Guide to the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation, has just been released. You can see more about this book in the book's blog.

I originally posted the following as a comment to a very interesting thread on David Heinemeier's Loud Thinking blog called "Shaking up tech publishing." I thought I would share it here also on my own blog, with the thought in mind that people might be interested in learning more about what we're doing with this developer.* Books thing.

A review of The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer by David Leavitt. Leavitt's biography regales readers with back story, including idiosyncrasies and horror stories associated not only with Turing, but some of his contemporaries.

I won't pretend that I'm an expert at running an advertising-funded print magazine with a circulation in the tens of thousands, but it has always seemed to me that the challenge of SD Magazine was the paradox that the readers most interested in technical content are not necessarily the ones who have decision-making power regarding (or even interest in) expensive testing, configuration management, and "lifecycle management" tools.