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The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

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Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#101

Post by eklavya »

JimDabell wrote: post #22
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.

I don't think that's fair. The driving point of that book was that developers needed a higher level language to talk about these patterns than simply at the code level, and showed people how to put together a vocabulary. Yes, it came with a library of sample patterns useful for Java developers, but they weren't egregious examples, nor were they the main point of the book. They were just taken to an extreme by people…

There already is a vocabulary for programming design patterns (monads et al) but people seem to hate/fear them for some reason.

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#102

Post by sjs7007 »

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…

It seems there is a MIT OCW course on it : https://ocw.mit.edu/high-school/humanities-and-social-scienc....

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#103

Post by goostavos »

iak8god wrote: post #82
jasode wrote: post #30

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 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…

> This is a misunderstanding of the DP book. That may be, but it's a very common misunderstanding of the book by junior developers who read the book as a list of recipes to use anywhere they might be applicable. Is it the book's fault that it's understood this way? I don't know. Regardless, the book + this persistent understanding and use of it are, as grabcocque says, "responsible for more atrocious over-abstracted,…

I dunno if it's just _junior_ ones. I've encountered my share of "enterprise architects" that will use this book as though it were a bible when trying to justify their near-insane scribbling of boxes and lines on the white board.

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#104

Post by curuinor »

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…

I heard a story from an AI professor a few years ago, who had an interesting heuristic for picking grad student applications to trash: if it mentions GEB, off it goes into the circular file.

Fun book. Hofstadter actually doesn't like computers, apparently: this is in the record, and I've heard him mention that fact multiple times. He just likes playing with ideas.

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#105

Post by forgetsusername »

How valuable is this without any of the discussion context surrounding these books? It seems unlikely that I'm going to purchase a book based on a metric like "mentions", when much of the discussion could be negative. I mean, I get it from the perspective of scraping/development practice, but it doesn't feel overly useful. And I'm a book hunter.

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#106

Post by hodgesrm »

I'm really happy to see "Java Concurrency in Practice" at #4 on the list.

It's a great intro to concurrent programming with lessons that apply to virtually any high-level programming language. The chapter on the Java memory model is the best practical description of how languages map to multi-processor memory models I have ever read. (Chapter 16 in my edition.)

After reading this book it's easy to understand why concurrency features in other languages are necessary and what they are doing behind the scenes. Golang channels come lightly to mind.

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#107

Post by JimDabell »

ajmurmann wrote: post #86
JimDabell wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's fair. The driving point of that book was that developers needed a higher level language to talk about these patterns than simply at the code level, and showed people how to put together a vocabulary. Yes, it came with a library of sample patterns useful for Java developers, but they weren't egregious examples, nor were they the main point of the book. They were just taken to an extreme by people…

I think it's not fair to the authors. As you say they are clear about the patterns being examples. However, there seems to be something about the book or maybe patterns in general that make it seemingly impossible for many developers to not look for use cases of these patterns and start using them in cases that don't quite match. I lead a book club at a post employer where we read the GoF. I constantly emphasized tha…

> However, there seems to be something about the book or maybe patterns in general that make it seemingly impossible for many developers to not look for use cases of these patterns and start using them in cases that don't quite match.

Perhaps. But consider the background. People write code that isn't very well designed all the time. Maybe you just see these patterns misused so often because you can identify and name them. This is entirely the point behind the book – so we can identify these common patterns and talk about them at a higher level.

You've probably seen bad code where you can't describe what's wrong with it succinctly a lot too. But you don't have the option there of saying "oh, they've used a factory there when they shouldn't have" because the bad code doesn't follow a pattern that you know / have named. So all of those cases just get filed away in the fuzzy "bad code" category instead of being an example of a pattern being misapplied.

By definition, almost, something being a pattern is going to be something you see misapplied simply because that's part of the purpose of design patterns – so you can comprehend these problems better.

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#108

Post by munificent »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #34
JimDabell wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's fair. The driving point of that book was that developers needed a higher level language to talk about these patterns than simply at the code level, and showed people how to put together a vocabulary. Yes, it came with a library of sample patterns useful for Java developers, but they weren't egregious examples, nor were they the main point of the book. They were just taken to an extreme by people…

That's very interesting. I haven't read Design Patterns. I have read A Pattern Language, and the Timeless Way of Building, by Christopher Alexander, and Patterns of Software by Richard Gabriel. It's been my understanding that Design Patterns had only a couple of dozen patterns (which turn up again and again in Java code) and prescribed their use generally, but if they're only examples of patterns , and programmers ar…

> which turn up again and again in Java code

This is true, but it's an effect, not a cause of the book. "Design Patterns" is older than Java. They wrote it based on patterns they saw mainly in Smalltalk and C++.

> prescribed their use generally

Like "A Pattern Language", "Design Patterns" reads more descriptively than prescriptively. It's, "Here's a thing we saw people do. Here's what problem they were solving with it. Here's the context of their problem. Here's the positive and negative consequences."

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#109

Post by munificent »

laxd wrote: post #57
gnufied wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What i listed was just an example but you can verify quickly - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0201633612/?tag=devbookscom20-20 without opening the actual book. And afaict - none of the patterns I listed are mentioned verbatim.

Seems like MVC is treated in GoF. http://blog.iandavis.com/2008/12/what-are-the-benefits-of-mv...

It talks a little about it, but it's not called out as a specific pattern with a chapter all its own.

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#110

Post by Kiro »

curuinor wrote: post #104
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…

I heard a story from an AI professor a few years ago, who had an interesting heuristic for picking grad student applications to trash: if it mentions GEB, off it goes into the circular file. Fun book. Hofstadter actually doesn't like computers, apparently: this is in the record, and I've heard him mention that fact multiple times. He just likes playing with ideas.

> if it mentions GEB, off it goes into the circular file

Why?

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