Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Three Book Reviews

Updated: Fixed the title which referenced two books when I’m actually reviewing three. Would have caught that off by one error had I written a test first…

Three long-overdue book reviews!

Debug It!

Debug It!: Find, Repair, and Prevent Bugs in Your Code by Paul Butcher, published by Pragmatic Press. ISBN 193435628X. This, coupled with David Agans’ Debugging, is a must-have on a programmer’s bookshelf.

Code goes wrong, systems get tetchy, and you need a logical approach to dealing with problems. Butcher’s book lays out lots of great tips and practices for finding, fixing, and preventing bugs in your software. I love his emphasis on empirical, measured approaches to troubleshooting, and I also like that he draws a clear border between finding and fixing bugs. You really do need to step back and take a breath after you’ve found a pesky bug, because you’ll want a different approach for fixing it and preventing other similar bugs.

“Debug It!” puts a great emphasis on controlling the environment and isolating one thing at a time as you work through finding bugs. Butcher’s sections making nondeterministic bugs deterministic and his logical steps for approaching bugs are wonderful. I also LOVE that he emphasizes, strongly, that the debugger is a tool of last resort. An important tool, but one to use only after you’ve exhausted other avenues. (I’m a firm believer the debugger is a time sink. Manually stepping through code is a horrible use of your time.)

Butcher covers a great many topics from the team’s culture to methodologies. Along the way he offers insight on tracking your bugs, practical tooling advice around assertions, and finishes up with a great section on Anti-Patterns. Here you’ll find some great reading around culture (had to work with a Prima Donna, anyone?), methodologies, and team culture (Code Ownership, FTW!).

This really was a tremendous book, and I highly recommend it!

The Manga Guide to the Universe

The Manga Guide to the Universe by Kenji Ishikawa, et. al. Published by No Starch Press. ISBN 1593272677.

I’ve gotten several Manga Guide to… books and they’ve all been wonderful. The Universe guide is no exception! The book’s comic-style is entertaining, although I could do without the weird females-as-sex-objects undertone, and the authors have done a great job bringing some really arcane, difficult topics to an understandable level.

The book weaves its education of the reader around a central plot where three girls are trying to write and create a school play. Their attempts to flesh out their storyline bring them in to contact with a number of other characters, each giving different insights into astrophysics, astronomy, and the historical evolution of science and theory in these domains.

I greatly enjoyed the historical aspect of the book – learning how scientists like Kepler, Galileo, and Copernicus made their discoveries is really fascinating. The book’s main storyline is interspersed with a lot of great sidebars on these practical matters in both historical and current contexts. You’ll read about how ancients attempted to measure distances of solar bodies, what dark matter is, how the universe was formed, and what scientists are working on currently.

This is another great addition to the Manga series, and I’m very happy to have gotten it!

The Agile Samurai

The Agile Samurai: How Agile Masters Deliver Great Software by Jonathan Rasmusson, Pragmatic Press. ISBN 1934356581.

I get many free books for review – this is one I paid for out of my own pocket and it was worth every penny. Clear, well-written, and extremely useful. This book stays very focused on what matters in building a successful agile practice without being preachy or vague.

Rasmusson doesn’t pull punches on silliness around “agile” being some silver bullet. He’s pragmatic and practical – and blunt when discussing schizophrenias like management by miracle (an unrealistic plan has a miracle event which results in working software. Yeah, that happens often!).

He’s also hard-nosed (in a gentle way) about the fundamental problem in any software project: poor communication. Consider this beauty from Chapter 3:

Q: What kills most projects?

A: The assumption of consensus where none exists.

Much of his book (well, so much of “agile,” really) is about ensuring clarity of communication.

Rasmusson walks you through a Project Inception workshop to “Get Everyone On the Bus” then moves on to the other standard agile topics. He does a wonderful job explaining user stories and estimation—one of the better jobs around points I’ve ever read—and he lays out a nice clear picture of why and how you should set up a visual workspace.

The book finishes up with a nicely done section on building the software. Rasmusson walks through the standard fare of test driven development, refactoring, technical debt, and continuous integration. If you’ve read much about agile you’ll likely not learn anything in this section, but its tone and content is every bit well done as the other sections.

I’ve read plenty of books on Agile. This one’s definitely in the top three.

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