In the 80s, Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a new machine tries, the history of the development of a mini-computer: the new science of business and nascent culture of electronic hardware and software, the characteristic of the time. Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code draws on Kidder model because it tries to analyze the situation in the software, the Internet and everything around 2006 through the lens of Chandler, an as yet unfinished software application for managing personal information .
The Chandler project from Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development and author of its 1-2-3 spreadsheet, and later co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation-isn’t the primary point of Dreaming in Code, though reading software people and their social behavior is at least as interesting as read that the meerkats or monkeys. Instead, Chandler is a device with which Rosenberg takes on rhetoric, the big questions: How can the software development work (or not)? Why is the reuse of software modules rarely work correctly? Is Open Source Development by volunteers over the Internet lead to innovation or just insanely bifurcated chaos? Chandler helps his readers think more clearly about all these issues, but “answers” to these questions are of course not, that is one of the points.
The problem with books about technical subjects that aspire to contribute to a general audience, particularly computers and software, is that these issues are so far outside the realm of familiarity of most people that the prose bogs in analogy and metaphor. Rosenberg manages to much, a readable and provide software development and culture. -David Wall
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[smartads]
http://rapidshare.com/files/241375340/Dreaming-in-code.rar
http://up-file.com/download/7c56e287d264ef6a7df23f58286defefc
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=SWM525FQ
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