Comments on: Brushing Up

By: The Indiana Jones School of Management

The Indiana Jones School of Management — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 02:22:35 +0000

Code

As I’ve discussed a couple times, I’ve been reading Charles Petzold’s Code I finished just now, and so I’d like to share some scattered thoughts:

Petzold builds slowly but swiftly, if that makes any sense. He divides the…

By: The Indiana Jones School of Management

The Indiana Jones School of Management — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 16:44:13 +0000

Update on Brushing Up

I’ve been chugging through Charles Petzold’s Code, as I said I would, and I’m reallyenjoying it. This should be required reading at MSMS.
If everything else on Joel Spolsky’s software reading list is this good … man. …

By: GFMorris.com

GFMorris.com — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 17:24:59 +0000

Virtual Bookshelf Meme

Dangit, I’ve been tagged by Spencer for one of these foofy meme things. This time, the theme is books, which is something I don’t have a handle on nearly as well as I might, say, my music collection. [No worries: once I finish moving int…

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Sat, 21 May 2005 16:33:08 +0000

I've already got a great database design text, Spencer, although one reason to go back to school would be to consider a class on set theory. [Maybe I'll be able to sneak that in my EM work. Dunno.] Brad: thanks for the Knuth pointer. I've read about John's perusal of it, and I know several MSMS alumni who are also great fans of Knuth.

By: AnotherCoward

AnotherCoward — Sat, 21 May 2005 04:25:46 +0000

Mythical Man Month is a must-read if you’re involved in a multi-man project.

Most of what I learned was from lecture, co-op, and a few school projects. One of the best lecture series I have ever had was actually in my undergrad intro to databases which walked us from requirements through forming an entity-relationship diagram, mapping that into a relational schema, and then normalizing the schema. I’ve used his methodology many times for both database and OO software design. If you’re interested, I could reproduce it.

Other than that, I stick to documentation and code examples. Java has the best documentation in the business. Apache also has some really good documentation. O’Reilly has a number of good “… By Example” books. There’s any number of good patterns books out there.

The K&R Book is essential for C. I kinda feel the same way about Barnestroup’s C++ book, but some people “boo, hiss” at it. The best thing for Java would probably be the tutorials linked off of java.sun.com.

I’m not certain why Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is listed… it’s not specifically oriented towards software… but then again, it’s a broadly applicable book and in any event, I highly recommend it.

By: Brad

Brad — Sat, 21 May 2005 02:30:15 +0000

There’s the Knuth “Art of Computer Programming” books that are meant to be quite good. Pricey, but when are computer books ever cheap?

By: Rick

Rick — Fri, 20 May 2005 18:24:39 +0000

One that is on the list that I can vouch for (as can Jonathan) is Code Complete. I don’t know that it would work for a beginning programmer though.

If at some point you guys come across a good, introductory C++/OOP book, let me know. I’ve got a few co-workers that are just now transitioning into the C++ world. I leared in in college and relied almost completely on lecture.

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Fri, 20 May 2005 18:10:50 +0000

No, not really. I’ll look to you and Spencer for recommendations [as well as to Rick and John Wilson].

By: Jeff H

Jeff H — Fri, 20 May 2005 18:08:49 +0000

Do you have any good books on Object Oriented Programming? I’ll have to see what I have a home…. I seem to remember the one that I had in my OOP class was really good.

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Fri, 20 May 2005 17:58:10 +0000

Well, you know what my project thoughts are, Jeff.

I’ve got a few O’Reilly texts, but I always come up to the realization that I’m really baseless for programming concepts that I should know but don’t, so I end up aping things. That’s not really good practice. :sigh:

By: Jeff H

Jeff H — Fri, 20 May 2005 17:53:47 +0000

That’s a really good list of books. The Mythical Man-Month book is a must-read and I have a copy of the Rapid Development book and like that book a lot, too, but both of those books are for large-scale development. I’m assuming that nothing you are going to be doing will be on a team of 100 people

The K&R book is absolutely essential if you plan to do any desktop software development. No C programmer worth their salt should be without it.

…and of course, if there’s any language you want to learn, I highly recommend the O’Reilly series.