Why do all societies we know of practice some form of religion? Either religion must be “true”, or there must be some sort of natural explanation for this universal phenomenon. [caption id=“attachment_403” align=“alignright” width=“161” caption=“Breaking the Spell”][/caption] “Breaking the Spell” by Daniel Dennett presents avenues of research into these explanation. He does not profess to have the answers to this question, or even the right question. He merely sets out to prove that the questions are important ones and ones that we can hope to gain insight into.

[caption id=“attachment_394” align=“alignright” width=“300” caption=“Summer is starting”][/caption] “Predictably Irrational” is a perfect book for lazy summer days on the beach or, in this case, while enjoying a beer from top of Oslo’s tallest office building. Dan Ariely is on a bit of a crusade against traditional economics, with it’s idea of rational behavior from everyone in the marketplace.

After receiving request to revive my book reviews, I’ve decided to blog about books I read again. If a known terrorist in police custody knew the whereabouts of a ticking bomb about to explode in a large city, would the use of torture be acceptable? Would it be helpful? I stumbled across Alfred McCoy through fora.tv. The program impressed me so much that I decided to pick up his book A Question of Torture.

I read an extremely intesting book last week. Cliff Stoll’s “The Cuckoo’s Egg” is a true story about how the author was tracking a hacker in the mid-eighties. It reads like a spy novel, but is appearently all true. I picked the book up at 11 at night, and was unable to put it down until I had completed the whole thing! The book gives a pretty good understanding of computer crime, crimefighting, and the basic methods of the typical script kiddie.

I bought User Stories Applied to get help with practical problems with writing good user stories and requirements in general, but it ended up changing the way I think about requirements and tracking them. The book first fullfills one very important mission. It answers “what is a good user story” with a mnemonic rule: Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimatable, Small, and Testable (INVEST). Cohn refers to William Wake as the source of this mnemonic, but expands further upon how to achieve it.

Yes! The first thing that strikes me about Eric Evans “Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software” is how it seems to bring together the ideas that have resounded the best with me during the last few years. The central thesis of the book is that that enterprise software should to be built around the model that (non-software) experts in the field has of the problem domain. The shared understanding between the software developers and the domain experts and users facilitates communication.

I was recommended “The Art of UNIX Programming” by Eric Raymond (esr) from Joel Spolsky’s “Joel-On-Software” blog. The recommendation in it self warrants some comments, as Joel Spolsky normally is very much a Windows-kind of guy. Despite the title, the book definately has much to offer people who never touch UNIX as well. esr focuses on the cultural aspects as much as the technical aspects. For organisations that are migrating into Unix infrastructure the ramifications of the Unix culture can be hard to grasp.

If a beginning programmer was to read just one book, this would definately rank high on a list of candidates. (But then again, why should a beginning programmer only read one book) “Agile Software Development: Practices, Principles, and Patterns” is in many ways Robert C. Martin’s magnum opus. After having read much of his papers on Dependency Inversion Principe, the Open-Closed Principle and other object-oriented methods, as well as Extreme Programming, Agile Software Development puts it all together.

Update: Cleaned up mess made by “WYSIWYG” tool) Rating: Must-buy The agile movement has started to gain speed and become more mainstream, and the Poppendiecks’s “Lean Software Development” added an important part of the puzzle for me. Like so many manifestos before it, Lean Software Development compares software development to other industries (lean thinking takes its roots in the Toyota manifacturing system). However, the authors reach a very different set of conclusions.

Beyond Software Architecture (Luke Hohmann) is an invaluable read for any aspiring project manager or program manager. There is so much more to getting successful programs out the door than just the classical analysis, design, development, test. The most important feature of this book is how it helps frame software development in a larger picture. The point of software development is to create value for someone. It is important not to lose sight of that fact.

Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets by Frank Partnoy is a fascinating book. Partnoy describes how the ever raising performance-related bonuses for brokerage bankers in the 1980s lead the brokers to create a succession of schemes to inflate bonuses. The early waves of this phenomenon was in the dervatives business. Derivatives are financial instruments the payoff of which is determined by other factors. The stated purpose of a derivative is to sell the risk related to something to someone who is better prepared to handle it.

Ullman’s book describes the lives of two people related to a large software development project in the early 80s. Ethan Levin is the programmer who is judged responsible for the bug. As it proves to be impossible to reproduce reliably his life seems to spiral down into dispair, loneliness, and depression. Ullman is a master at describing the almost hypnotizing urge to “just fix this last problem before” when programming. The dysfunctional team and people in the novel are more dysfunctional than anyone I have ever met, but they are perfect carricatures (I hope!

A is for Apple You may have already known that A is for Apple. But did you know that O is for O’Reilly? Check out what Google reports for single character queries. (From Ward Cunningham’s Weblog) [via Artima Weblogs]

This book talks about the role of a tester in an XP project. So it is about acceptance testing, not unit testing (see Test-Driven Development by Kent Beck for that). The long and short of it is that I would really like to run an XP project with people who have read, understand, and become excited about this book. My experience is that a project suffers from not having someone who’s job is 100% quality.

The Psychology of Computer Programming (Jerry Weinberg) The Pragmatic Programmer (Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas) - from Journeyman to Master (the view of the software professional as a craftman is the only thing that will save the business!) PeopleWare (Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister) Extreme Programming Explained (Kent Beck) After the Gold Rush (Steve McConnell)

Test-Driven Development describes in detail this technique from Extreme Programming. In addition, the author spends some time teaching the reader a useful set of mental tools for writing better code. TDD is a very fast read, but it is full of useful information. If I wanted my developers to only read one small book about software development, this would be it. Note: The back of the book lists it as “Software Engineering/Testing”.

Brilliant book. “How the Mind Works” is a tour de force over many of the puzzling aspects of the human mind: Why can our eyes be fooled by optical illusions? Why would we evolve emotions? Why would we evolve behaviour that makes us unable to fully control ourselves, like rage? The book puts forth theories for all these questions and more. The best part of the book, however, is the style in which it is written.