Dreaming in Code

Dreaming in code : two dozen programmers, three years, 4,732 bugs, and one quest for transcendent software, written by Scott Rosenberg in 2007, is a wonderful read for any software developer, and it is just as unique as it's name.

It begins with the following quotation and goes on to prove that with a true story. 
Software is hard — Donald Knuth, author of The Art of Computer Programming

As the author himself  explains;

"The shelves of the world are full of how-to books for software developers. This is not one of them.

It poses a question and tells a tale. Why is good software so hard to make? Since no one seems to have a definitive answer even now, at the start of the twenty-first century, fifty years deep into the computer era, I offer, by way of exploration, the tale of the making
of one piece of software—a story about a group of people setting their shoulders once more to the boulder of code and heaving it up the hill, stymied by obstacles old and new, struggling to make something useful and rich and lasting."

This book had me hooked in the past few weeks. It felt like being around silicon valley, listening to fables of software history and time traveling through the decades in the world of computing. I've shared some of the insights from the book in my previous posts.

Kudos to the author for the excellent work.

And to my fellow developers, this is highly, I repeat HIGHLY, recommended.