The first few pages of Fred Brooks’ The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist are… how shall I say this… dry. Like listening to a philosopher whose work long ago degenerated into a recursive attempt to define itself.

In an earlier paper, I divided the tasks in building software into essence and accident. (This Aristotleian language is not to denigrate the accidental parts of software construction. In modern language the terms would more understandably be essential and incidental.) The part of software building I called essence is the mental crafting of the conceptual construct; the part I called accident is its ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz…….

This was a bit disappointing to someone with fond, formative and possibly – I worried, briefly – rose-coloured recollections of The Mythical Man-Month. It was a tough enough slog that a chapter and a half into The Design of Design (and they’re short chapters) I left it on my bedside table for a week to gather dust and guilt.

Tonight I got through to the end of chapter 3, and the tone is… different.

If you feel inclined to tackle this book, I think one way to approach it is to think of the first two chapters as Brooks leading us through Understanding Poetry, by Dr J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D.

Chapter 3 is where Brooks chimes in and calls it excrement.

Obviously I’m not very far into the book yet, so if I do have a review it’ll come much later, but for a bit of flavour I just want to quote the very end of chapter 3:

The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it.

Part two of the Amazon shipment arrived today:

• Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction – I read a recommendation for this somewhere. Can’t immediately remember why I thought I needed it desperately.
• The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist – by Fred Brooks, author of The Mythical Man-Month, which all of you should have read by now.
• The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine – sort of a challenge to myself to see whether I can follow it.
• Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! – a physicist to break up the monotony of computer scientists.

…plus a few books for wifey.

I feel subtly like I might have gone overboard in some direction.

Two books arrived from Amazon this morning, the first batch of a shipment of eleven. (This is our effort to take advantage of the strong Australian weak American dollar). By slight coincidence they’re both collections of essays by or interviews with programmers:

• Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming
• The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky

The downside of ordering a big load of books at once is that I’ll probably lose momentum at some point, and half of them will sit on the shelf for years. This is arguably too high a cost for saving a little money on shipping and effort on picking them up from the post office.

Maybe it’s time to get a Kindle.

Maybe the time to get a Kindle was before I ordered all these books.

Maybe I swore I wouldn’t get an e-book reader until they got past the whole DRM thing.

Maybe I should spend less time thinking and blogging about the issues surrounding books and more time actually reading them.