Books I recommend to my software engineering students

Post by MamaJumba » Fri, Apr 24, 2020, 11:09 AM UTC

JamesBarney wrote: post #86

hardwaregeek wrote: post #4

I've advocated for a "canon" of books for software engineering and computer science that could be taught in school. The canon would accomplish several goals: it'd inform students about the less technical but profoundly important ideas within CS (Brooks' No Silver Bullet, The 10x cost incurred when moving from stage to stage in waterfall, how to treat and manage failure, etc.), it'd teach students how to think about p…

I disagree. I think books on software management and process are mostly lost on someone who hasn't been involved in the process. (Hell many of those books are lost on project managers) I think the most important subjects to teach students are javascript, css, & sql (or mongo). Before you teach a beginner wood worker the "Zen of wood" you teach them how to cut a piece of wood without sawing off a finger. The rest will…

Post by afpx » Fri, Apr 24, 2020, 1:02 PM UTC

billfruit wrote: post #66

hardwaregeek wrote: post #4

I've advocated for a "canon" of books for software engineering and computer science that could be taught in school. The canon would accomplish several goals: it'd inform students about the less technical but profoundly important ideas within CS (Brooks' No Silver Bullet, The 10x cost incurred when moving from stage to stage in waterfall, how to treat and manage failure, etc.), it'd teach students how to think about p…

I'm kind of bothered by a lack of rigour and science in general software engineering disciplines. The vast majority of decisions seems to be made subjectively that any objective criteria. Also industry is very bad at documenting it's processes and experiences to the community, most documents if any are available to the company internally only. Also detailed histories of the devdlopment of large and complex software n…

Post by pjmorris » Fri, Apr 24, 2020, 1:19 PM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #32

pjmorris wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Becoming A Technical Leader', Gerald Weinberg

I probably ought to read this one. I got on a Weinberg reading kick after reading some recommendations here a few months before his death. The one I particularly liked was The Psychology of Computer Programming . While dated in many ways (like MMM ), it has a lot of interesting ideas and discussion about the structure and behavior of people and teams (regardless of discipline, though he was writing about programmers)…

Post by m11a » Fri, Apr 24, 2020, 1:22 PM UTC

scotch_drinker wrote: post #35

Blech. Nothing here that's obscure or likely to alter the path of some one's knowledge. No philosophy, no history, and the list includes Gladwell. Actually, the inclusion of Gladwell probably distinctly colors my thinking on the subject. Maybe "How to read a book" or "The Alchemist" or I don't know, something that's not just so totally typical.

Post by Jtsummers » Fri, Apr 24, 2020, 1:28 PM UTC

Tomis02 wrote: post #84

hardwaregeek wrote: post #4

I've advocated for a "canon" of books for software engineering and computer science that could be taught in school. The canon would accomplish several goals: it'd inform students about the less technical but profoundly important ideas within CS (Brooks' No Silver Bullet, The 10x cost incurred when moving from stage to stage in waterfall, how to treat and manage failure, etc.), it'd teach students how to think about p…

> The 10x cost incurred when moving from stage to stage in waterfall This seems to be a common falsehood propagated by Agile consultants and swallowed whole by an industry that doesn't know any better. It doesn't look like the waterfall model was ever used on a significant scale; not as far as I remember, anyway. https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/139107