Dreaming in Code

An interesting read, half the story of a typical start-up trainwreck and half a philosophical meditation on why, exactly, “software is hard”. Rosenberg takes the time to explain quite a lot about coding and programmer culture in layman's terms – which is redundant for most programmers, while still being technical enough that I'm not sure, say, my parents would be able to get through it. I think the ideal audience is entrepreneurs and those who find themselves in the position of needing to manage programmers; it would also be a good book to assign undergraduate CS students, since it includes both a readable primer of software engineering methods and a sense of what it means to choose programming as a career.

Five years old as of now (it was published in 2007), so it's charmingly dated in some respects. The book ended on a positive note, but the software project that formed the center of the narrative seems to have quietly vanished off the face of the earth; from a purely literary perspective, I wish someone had written a blog post or some kind of wrap-up to serve as an epilogue.

For non-programmers attempting to understand the arcane world of creating software, this book gives a great insight to how mammoth the task is. The tale of the attempt to create Chandler is dealt with in enough details that makes me really respect coders, even though this software eventually did not get anywhere.