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I’ve been making my way through two books; “The Old New Thing: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows” and “Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software“.

The Old New Thing is a look at the evolution of Microsoft Windows from someone who’s been there since the beginning.  It’s not exactly the best book in the world but does give you an interesting look at design decisions that were made.  A lot of the book seems to be a half angry developer defending Windows from all of the common complaints often directed towards Microsoft.  I’ve semi enjoyed it because some pieces of the book are interesting.  Other pieces of the book are overly detailed in terms of Win32 code and simply not worthwhile for most people to read.

Dreaming in Code is a look at an overly ambitious project from it’s beginning.  It examines the process from day one and gives you an excellent look at the real process of software development.  The example turned out to be a failure in many ways, which leads to an even better learning experience for the reader.  I’ve found myself frustrated at times while reading the book.  You’ll quickly see a common trend throughout the book; the project group can’t seem to make a decision and run with it.  In all seriousness, it takes a solid two years before the group has a real plan for their project.  Now, that isn’t a flaw in the book, but rather a plus.  The book conveys that project so well that you can almost get emotionally stressed out by the lack of progress these people are making.  I would definitely recommend this book to anyone involved in the software product life cycle as you’ll learn a lot of what not to do.

This morning my next two books came in; “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” and “Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code“.  Both of which are a little less than light reading, but I’m looking forward to them nonetheless.