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The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

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Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#91

Post by LoSboccacc »

gcp wrote: post #69
LoSboccacc wrote: post #62

too much hard coding books imho. 'the design of everyday thing' and 'don't make me think' should be read more.

the design of everyday thing I've seen that recommended many times but it's a terrible book, IMHO. (I don't remember the specifics why, but vaguely remember the author waffles around without any real points).

I think there's some value in showing how design needs to be defined by usability and not the other way around. I agree the point could have been made in way less words, but there's something extremely useful in learning to thinking about user first and not many books that talk about that.

Like, the kitchen top example, which is best summarized with two pictures:

http://www.homedepot.com/catalog/productImages/1000/20/20f59...

http://www.homedepot.com/catalog/productImages/1000/ba/ba845...

I find topology influencing brain patterns being a fascinating topic.

Also: http://i.imgur.com/ACe2b51.jpg technician clearly didn't read the book XD

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#92

Post by kej »

gcp wrote: post #69
LoSboccacc wrote: post #62

too much hard coding books imho. 'the design of everyday thing' and 'don't make me think' should be read more.

the design of everyday thing I've seen that recommended many times but it's a terrible book, IMHO. (I don't remember the specifics why, but vaguely remember the author waffles around without any real points).

I think it suffers a little from the Seinfeld effect, where it was completely original at the time but created enough of a following that it seems derivative when you go back to it.

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#93

Post by vladwetzel »

SquareWheel wrote: post #89

You're violating the terms of Amazon's associate program by including affiliate links without notice. >"You must clearly state the following on your Site or any other location where Amazon may authorize your display or other use of Content: “We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and…

Oops. Thanks for comment, will fix it asap

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#94

Post by vladwetzel »

SquareWheel wrote: post #89

You're violating the terms of Amazon's associate program by including affiliate links without notice. >"You must clearly state the following on your Site or any other location where Amazon may authorize your display or other use of Content: “We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and…

Fixed, thanks again

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#95

Post by ryandrake »

jasode wrote: post #30
hbex5 wrote: post #3

Ah, the good old Design Patterns book, responsible for more atrocious over-abstracted, unreadable, hard to maintain Java code than anything else before or since.

>, the good old Design Patterns book, responsible for more atrocious over-abstracted, This is a misunderstanding of the DP book. It would be similar to saying that the existence of TVTropes.com is responsible for terrible scripts of tv shows and movies. Or, the existence of the Oxford English Dictionary is responsible for bad novels and useless documentation. The DP book is a catalog (to gain awareness) and not a che…

Unfortunately, it tends to be _read_ as a how-to book rather than as a catalog of observations. I have actually heard from a professional software engineer, "We can't write the code this way because it's not using any known design pattern," said with a straight face. This is partially the mentality that gives us things like the classic AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean[1] class.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4549544

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#96

Post by sAbakumoff »

JelteF wrote: post #79

Although not directly development related. The most impressive book I've had the pleasure of reading is "Gödel Escher Bach: An eternal golden braid" (also known as GEB) from Douglas Hofstadter. It's hard to explain what it is about exactly, but it contains ideas and concepts from mathematics, computer science, philosophy and conscience. All of it is explained in very clear and interesting way. I can recommend it to a…

wow, this book has the soaring rating on Amazon. I added to my "to read" list, 10x for suggestion

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#97

Post by RawData »

VLM wrote: post #76
RawData wrote: post #14

No Ruby on Rails books? Or Python?

I'm pretty sure it skews old by not correcting for publication age. That's how "heads up design patterns" from 2004 beats almost everything since, simply by being older. In 2030 something newer will have higher numbers, but an old classic will have even larger numbers, so ... Eventually old stuff tails off. I learned C from K+R edition one in the 80s, and the ANSI edition two has now displaced it.

Ah, yep...that explains it then.

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#98

Post by akulbe »

It seems interesting to me, how often books about C++ are mentioned in there. 5 of 30 listed

I say that, because it seems like people like to talk bad about C++ as if it's terrible language (rather than just another tool in the toolbox).

I don't have an opinion either way. Just making an observation.

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#99

Post by [deleted] »

SquareWheel wrote: post #89

You're violating the terms of Amazon's associate program by including affiliate links without notice. >"You must clearly state the following on your Site or any other location where Amazon may authorize your display or other use of Content: “We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and…

[deleted]

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#100

Post by acdha »

jasode wrote: post #51
dragonwriter wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> >, the good old Design Patterns book, responsible for more atrocious over-abstracted, > This is a misunderstanding of the DP book. It is discussing an effect of the book, not the intent . > It would be similar to saying that the existence of TVTropes.com is responsible for terrible scripts of tv shows and movies. Which would be entirely accurate if script writers were widely using TVTropes pages as templates and cr…

>It is discussing an effect of the book, not the intent. Do you truly believe that specific DP book caused that effect? I don't. The DP book is extremely dry reading and most programmers have not actually read it. ([In terms of readership/ownership ratio] It's a book like Stephen Hawking's "Brief History of Time" ... everybody knows about it and some might have it on the coffee table but very few actually read it.) I…

> Do you truly believe that specific DP book caused that effect? > > I don't. The DP book is extremely dry reading and most programmers have not actually read it.

This doesn't match my experience but I think that's because you're conflating two related ideas: while few people may have deeply read DP, that's not a requirement for it to have had a strong influence on them, any more than it is necessary for someone to have deeply read and understood their holy book to have strong religious beliefs.

I make that comparison because the worst projects I've seen were heavily based on DP but in a bad way because it was used more as a club than a means for self-improvement. Architects threw it around to bolster their status, a strong push towards ritual cargo culting rather than making sure the problem was well understood enough to know that the code being written matched the actual business case, and any criticism was met with a flak shield of “This is the best practice way according to DP”.

That's not necessarily DPs fault — although there is a discussion to be had about valuing comprehensibility if you want to make meaningful improvements — but it was definitely an effect shaping software development for the worse for over a decade.

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