I've just finished reading
Dreaming In Code by Scott Rosenburg
While trying to write a review on Amazon I struggled with whether to give it 0, 3 or 5 stars, let me explain
First the book is about the development of Chanlder, a next generation PIM sponsored by Mitch Kapor, ex Lotus Chief and with some of the big names in software development and open source, including Andy Hetzfeld whold wrote most of the original Max UI code.
What strikes you while reading this is what a complete disaster the project was, they seem to spend weeks if not months "thinking" about the design, navel gazing like never before. The book seems to suggest the designers never once tried to use actual customers or possible customers to understand the problem domain but instead came up with wierd and wonderful designs from the UI down to the lowest level code, most of which were near impossible to implement
The author then goes on to suggest, many times in the book, that software is hard and thats a fact. My god, its hard the way these people tried to develop it.
On the back of the book I downloaded Chandler, and what a waste of several man years, and several million $$'s its basically a very bad PIM that is barely intuitive, slow and to be honest a bit c**p.
So back to the review, if you want to read about the trials and tribulations of a complete mess of a software project, buy this book, 5 stars
If you want to read about how not to design and develop software in the current internet age, buy this book, 5 stars
If you want to read about how some of the apparent great minds in open source, are not really that great at working as a team in a real company, buy this book, 3 stars
If you want the author to describe every computer programming term in the most basic definition, buy this book, 2 stars
If you want to learn how to write great software, don't buy this book, 1 star
Poor people, you really did get it wrong
