kar1181

One of the really nice things about Julia and her writing style, is she makes quite complicated subjects fairly easy to grasp from a high level.

For beginners, or those who work much higher up the technology chain it provides a nice launching off point for further investigation.

I find her style quite fun and engaging.

There's a comment at the bottom of his original predictions blog, and it reminded me immediately of Alan Kay's 'pop culture' quote

"We work in a fashion industry, and marketing really matters.".

I don't know if I am getting older, but this rings very true to my ears, especially today.

The 2014 Edition featuring the story of IBM's system/360 development can be found here -http://www.computerhistory.org/core/media/pdf/core-2014.pdf

Awesome book, I actually bought a hardcopy for $150ish dollars a couple years ago because I wanted the tactile feel to go with the brilliant words.

For electronic consumption there's an excellent project on github that was mentioned here on hacker news earlier in the year / last year. You can find that here https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book/releases and it is the contents of the extreme edition formatted for modern e-readers.

The thing about Abrash, is not only is he brilliant, when he writes about hugely complicated things, he does so in a way that makes the reader feel smarter too.

That is an amazing gift to have.

My book was second hand already so it is showing its age. I like it as a bit of an heirloom but the electronic copy is actually accessible. The original, you need a forklift to remove it from the shelf!

I don't think there's anything quite like Abrash's tome in breadth or all the other intangibles he eloquently wrote about (I mean the best optimizer is between your ears is worth a book in itself!)

Bur for graphics programming, Foley and Van Damm is probably the canonical text - now in 3rd edition. http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Graphics-Principles-Practice-...

Hrmm which one to believe?

'We're not a terribly money-motivated group' http://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/9887522

'I developed humor as a defense mechanism. Now I drive a fucking Mercedes.' http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/15-09/mf_...

This is brilliant, thanks for linking this up.

Here is the famous Smalltalk issue Aug 1981. http://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08

You know nothing John Snow.

Import doesn't work, but the notification system is very sweet and unexpected. Can't wait to try this out with all my feeds. So far none of the 'son of reader' offerings have really done it for me.

No.

This isn't really a new thing though, is it. There is the (in)famous example of Ron Jeffries trying to solve Sudoku through TDD (and failing miserably). http://xprogramming.com/articles/oksudoku/

Compare and contrast his impotent flailing with Peter Norvig's masterful approach. http://norvig.com/sudoku.html

Of course for the lulz you had people like Spolsky and Martin all use it to set out their view of software engineering with essays like Duct Tape Programming and Echoes from the Stone Age.

Anyway ... The conclusion from it all was that TDD works best as a design tool for interface discovery. That you get a regression suite, of sorts, is a side effect.

It doesn't work as a specific optimization tool or algorithm discovery tool. Which isn't really surprising as these are two of the few remaining 'non-mechanical' aspects of programming.