181–190 of 256 posts
No Ruby on Rails books? Or Python?
But lots of C++ books. C++ and Python are my primary languages, and I own far more C++ books than Python. For C++ I've got all Scott Meyers stuff, Alexandrescu, Stroustrups C++ language. For Python I've got Beazley, and that's it. My guess is that Python, and probably Ruby too, are so much easier to learn than C++, so fewer books are read and sold.
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…
Mainstream developers who attend schools that produce Java developers believe that this is a recipe book. I have seen this book used at conference talks for nearly 20 years. Countless blog posts aimed at beginners reference this book as the way to solve problems.
The book itself is pretty explicit that they are not recipes, but that doesn't mean it isn't used that way.
Don't blame the book - blame the curriculum that's based on it.
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> 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.
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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.
He likes computers, he even likes AI. He doesn't buy into Ray Kurzweil's ideas about singularity [0,1]. He also (as I understand) is in Chomsky school of statistical learning as opposed to Peter Norvig (or Google) school [1,2]. Those two are highly unpopular stances to have these days, so I can see how that can be confused with not liking computers/AI. If you read GEB, you can see in different chapters that he is a b…
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,…
Certain other design patterns books in the software field (Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture and Enterprise Integration Patterns, for examples that happen to be on the shelf next to me at the moment) don't share those features.
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 didn't get a lot out of GEB, but I pored over Metamagical Themas [0]. It was perfect for a teenager just learning programming. The bite-sized nature of it makes it extremely approachable - perhaps a case of constraints (periodic column of N words) leading to more creative output. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Metamagical-Themas-Questing-Essence-P...
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I didn't get a lot out of GEB, but I pored over Metamagical Themas [0]. It was perfect for a teenager just learning programming. The bite-sized nature of it makes it extremely approachable - perhaps a case of constraints (periodic column of N words) leading to more creative output. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Metamagical-Themas-Questing-Essence-P...
How is Metamagical Schemas bit-sized? It is 850 pages long!
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.