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Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software |  |
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Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software | |
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到货及时，内容充实。还在慢慢研读。
书比想象中的小，但是别的都很好
"Dreaming on Code" are two books mixed together into one. One of the books is the observation of the author of a multi-year high-profile software development project. The project eventually failed, but that wasn't clear yet at the end of the book. The second book is the authors search for better ways of developing software. The book is structured as a few pages about the development project and a few pages of exploration.
For me, the book about the software project was the most interesting. The project is called Chandler done by a company called Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) by Mitch Kapor (the founder of Lotus). It's vision is to develop the next generation personal information manager (PIM), which is basically a calendar, email and note-maker integrated in one product. Chandler had a large investment and attracted some high-profile developers. Scott Rosenberg followed the Chandler project over a couple of years and the book describes his observations or narrative of the project.
The Chandler project is fascinating as they aim to do things different... and end up making all the mistakes of traditional software projects. They want to get something out quickly and facilitate an open source community to build up the product. They end-up over-designing, late delivering and over-complicating the whole project. It is really painful to follow the project (at least for me) as I could see them make the mistakes and would want to say "nooo!" but they did it anyways. Eventually the book ends without knowing the end of Chandler, but if you search online you'll discover that it unfortunately never delivered its vision.
The second book is the authors search for delivering better software. He basically picks a theme and describes that and explains some of the history. For example, at some point it explains what open source is and how open source was created. Similarly, it explains lots of aspects of software development. Most of these ought to be nothing new for nearly any software developer... and it suggests the book is actually targeted to people who aren't directly involved in software development but are curious about how it would work. The explorations were interesting but purposefully shallow, which made them a bit boring for me. Usually I ended up reading through them and wanting to go back to the Chandler project story to know what would happen there.
All in all, the book was well written. I enjoyed the Chandler parts a lot (4 stars) and felt the explorations were just ok (3 stars). I decided to average it out to 3 stars, especially for software developers who probably know all the explorations already. 4 stars for people who are interested in discovering more about software development. A pretty ok book.
I was required to read this book for a software engineering class. I can say that I really enjoyed the first 3/4 of this book. Unfortunately, the last section tend to drag on. The problem seems to be that the author was still in the research phase while writing and so the outcome of the project was unknown by the publishing of the book, so the end is the author trying to wrap things up nicely, but not doing as well as the beginning. That being said, I enjoyed reading about the trainwreck that was the Chandler development (lack of) process and had to do some of my own research to find out the current status of the project and the people on the team. This book was definitely one of the most interesting books I've had to read for class. I believe it would still be a good read for a person coming from a non-technical background.
The best aspect of "Dreaming in Code," by Scott Rosenberg, is the question it poses: why is developing software so hard? Why are software projects chronically late; why do so many fail? Rosenberg investigates that issue by embedding with the "Chandler" development team, in an open source project funded and led by multi-millionaire Mitch Kapor.
Learning about Kapor, who founded Lotus Development Corporation and designed the wildly popular spreadsheet software, Lotus 1-2-3, was in itself enough to make this book a worthwhile read for me. Nevertheless, "Dreaming in Code" fails in its major objective. The faults of the Chandler project - chiefly, "paralysis by analysis" - should have been glaringly obvious from the start, in 2001. It is little surprise that a project will be late or worse when it lacks a clear objective. What is atypical about Chandler is that it took so long to peter out. Its failure is a reminder that having a sugar daddy and no deadlines is more a prescription for failure than success.
Rosenberg monitored the work on Chandler for three years before he called it quits and wrote his book. Since then, Mitch Kapor has left the project, and withdrew funding in 2008. Chandler is available for download, but shows no sign of being the world-changing software tool that it was hoped to be.
"Dreaming in Code" follows the software development team responsible for Chandler, an open-source personal information manager (calendar+contacts+etc) over a few years. The author sought to find out why software projects more often than not come in horridly behind schedule and over budget, and despite all the advances and tools available to programmers, the answer seems to be the same in every case: overzealous and unrealistic goals from the management/customer...even when you have legends in the field working on the team. The prose is very relaxed and easy-going, almost to conversational, so this is a surprisingly quick read.
The book is about 2/3 following the day-to-day of the development team, 1/3 philosophizing about what programmers do and should do. The team started to grate on me after a while...maybe it was the whole "change the world" holier-than-thou approach they took to their project. It's just a calendar, and if you do a little research, it is utterly underwhelming. The history and philosophy of programming as the author sees it was very interesting, since I'm something of a code monkey myself. A reader from the general public might not appreciate that part so much, but this book will give most people a better sense of why software is buggy and takes so long to develop.
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