Coders at work is finally available

by oscardelben • 17 years ago

137 96 17 years ago

Awesome. I'm pre-ordering the second I get home from work... or maybe during lunch.

apgwoz• 17 years ago

There's no reason to pre-order, since it was released today. I did pre-order last week, and Amazon told me it'd be shipped on the 15th, sigh.

mhb• 17 years ago

Except that Amazon still shows it as pre-order (10:09 AM EST).

Maro3• 17 years ago

Funny, it was also pirated today. (I have an RSS watch for "darksiderg" on Mininova.)

Maro3• 17 years ago

To all the downvoters: Guess what, I live in Eastern Europe, so I can't go to the local bookstore to flip through books. English language books (most good stuff written today) doesn't get imported at all. Books that are popular in the US are translated (terrible for technical books) about 5-10 years after their original release date. So guess what, I download the books, look at them, and order the good ones (about 5 every few months) from Amazon and Alibris.

jacquesm8• 17 years ago

I think the downvotes may have something to do with the fact that you gave a bunch of information that make it very easy for others to download the book as well. Effectively you have probably cost the author a bunch of potential sales.

gjm11• 17 years ago

That's a pretty good justification for your grabbing a pirated copy, but that doesn't have much bearing on whether your comment was valuable. A downvote for your original comment is (I hope) a judgement about the value of your comment, not about your moral character.

GeneralMaximus• 17 years ago

I feel your pain :(

Here in India, I can only purchase a few selected O'Reilly titles, for which I have to travel across the city. Apress, Wrox, Packt are all available somewhere, but I still haven't found an accessible (read: near a Metro line) retail outlet that keeps those books.

amix• 17 years ago

I wish it was possible to buy a PDF version.

jsteele• 17 years ago

I believe the ebook option at http://apress.com/book/view/1430219483 is a PDF.

minsight• 17 years ago

It is. I've been reading it during my commute (it's ok - it's by train!) for the last week.

vsync• 17 years ago

I went there literally ready to punch in the CC#.

But $21?! I might as well pay the extra $9 and have a nice physical artifact to show for it.

mapleoin• 17 years ago

Masterminds of Programming[0] is another cool book on the subject.

[0] http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596515171/

Kaizyn2• 17 years ago

Yes, this was a really good book. I suspect that Coders at Work will be a little better though because the interviewer(s) in Masterminds seemed a bit weak and not really able to keep up with the interviewees in the discussions.

Kaizyn2• 17 years ago

Yes, this was a really good book. I suspect that Coders at Work will be a little better though because the interviewer(s) in Masterminds seemed a bit weak in places and not really able to keep up with the interviewees in the discussions.

10ren3• 17 years ago

Some discussion here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=583164

10ren3• 17 years ago

"Secrets of the Rockstar Programmers: Riding the IT Crest " http://ridingthecrest.com/

I think that completes the entire coder-interview genre.

ssn• 17 years ago

No sample/preview chapter?

amichail4• 17 years ago

Only two in the list are women. However, one could argue that almost all programmers will be women in the far future.

That's because as AI becomes more sophisticated, programming will become more like teaching.

And teaching is something that mostly interests women today.

cousin_it3• 17 years ago

It's pretty funny. If we accept your assumptions, we can conclude that most programmers in the far future will be AIs. No idea if those AIs will be male or female; more wild speculation is always welcome.

amichail4• 17 years ago

What if the AI were like a human child in intelligence? In that case, it would not be capable of teaching/programming at a high level of sophistication.

axod9• 17 years ago

WHAT???

jacquesm8• 17 years ago

> However, one could argue that almost all programmers will be women in the far future.

I find that hard to believe.

> And teaching is something that mostly interests women today.

I'm all for more balance but to either relegate women to teaching because 'that mostly interests women' (for which I have no evidence, my classes were pretty much 60/40 men/women, with the men predominant in the maths/physics/chemistry department, but that was a while ago) or to assume that men are not interested in it (they are), whichever way I slice it I can't make much sense of it.

Would you mind explaining ?

amichail4• 17 years ago

Men (and women) become professors to do research -- not to teach. In fact, top research universities try to minimize the undergraduate teaching that professors have to do.

hughprime• 17 years ago

Sweeping sexist generalization: women dominate schoolteaching more because they like children than because they like teaching.

thras• 17 years ago

Schopenhauer would agree with you. He says that women are so good with children because they are so childlike themselves.

jibiki• 17 years ago

Surprising. I always thought that people found their own gender to be more childlike. (Children are open books, but the other gender is always mysterious.)

khafra2• 17 years ago

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9itx5/why_progr...

Learning disability?

axod9• 17 years ago

>> "Crockford is, by nature, a simplifier and a tidier. He invented JSON, the data interchange format widely used in Ajax applications"

Does anyone else find it irritating to read "He invented JSON", which isn't true at all? He popularized and called out JSON which already existed.

cturner• 17 years ago

Perhaps 'discovered' or 'isolated' would be a better. It's the sort of thing that's unusual in computing but common in natural science. Something that's all around us, but we don't realise how to access it until someone comes along and componentises it for us. (The key quality of JSON for my perspective is that was a form that was immediately usable across several languages which already existed.)

markkanof• 17 years ago

Crockford actually makes the explicit distinction that he discovered JSON vs inventing it in a presentation he gave called "The JSON Saga".

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=crockford...

It seems like other people often say that he invented it, even though he doesn't say that.

jasonkester2• 17 years ago

Founders at Work is one of those books that I keep finding myself re-reading over and over. There is so much good stuff there.

For some reason, the description of this book just doesn't inspire me to read it. It's hard to articulate why that is, since it's in the same style as Founders, and it interviews a similar set of people.

Maybe it's just that I've heard enough from that generation of programmers. Maybe I've just heard enough from all programmers. Maybe, talking about programming is simply not interesting at all. I don't know.

Tell me about how you launched a billion dollar company from your apartment with stolen office chairs and I'm there. Tell me how you really like pointers, and I sort of lose interest.

mncaudill4• 17 years ago

Different strokes for different folks, my man. The business-oriented people can read Founders, the technical-minded people can read can read Coders, and then the intersection of the two can read both!

I personally find the idea of this book to be fascinating and pre-ordered it a couple of weeks ago.

ionfish• 17 years ago

> [T]he union of the two can read both!

Don't you mean the intersection of the two?

axod9• 17 years ago

Yeah I feel similar. Programming isn't that hard :/

Building a successful startup, selling stuff, getting investment etc etc - They seem orders of magnitude harder than programming.

mncaudill4• 17 years ago

Programming isn't that hard? Writing code is easy, writing good code is hard, otherwise more people would do it, right?

plinkplonk6• 17 years ago

" Programming isn't that hard"

Whoa! doesn't that depend very much on what exactly you mean by "programming" and which specific program you are trying to create ?

iron_ball• 17 years ago

Programming isn't that hard, but the business side is? The scales have been lifted from my eyes! Next time a "business guy" wants me to implement his great new idea for an iPhone app, I'll totally make it for him!

edw519• 17 years ago

Tell me about how you launched a billion dollar company from your apartment with stolen office chairs and I'm there. Tell me how you really like pointers, and I sort of lose interest.

Thank you. I thought I was the only one.

95% of the time I program. 5% I conduct business.

But for learning, the ratio is reversed. Whether it's hacker news, the articles I read on the web, or the books on my shelves, my interest is mainly in business stories, especially start-up success stories.

Not really sure why. Maybe because I think I have all the technology I need. If I need more, I'll find it and learn it. Always have, always will. It's nice to learn a new technique here and there, especially with data base and web technology, but that's rare.

The business success stories, OTOH, almost always fascinate me. I love Founders at Work and for some odd reason, Marcus Frind of plentyoffish is like a mythic hero to me: If a regular guy like him can do it, then so can the rest of us.

DannoHung• 17 years ago

Maybe this is why you spend so much time programming and so little time doing business.

plinkplonk6• 17 years ago

"Tell me about how you launched a billion dollar company from your apartment with stolen office chairs and I'm there. Tell me how you really like pointers, and I sort of lose interest."

Thankfully (for the authors and publishers), for some of us, that is reversed. The phrasing can be different.

"Tell me how and why you created a new language, and I am interested. Tell me how hard work and determination is how you made your money and the key to success for the rest of us and I lose interest"

EDIT: Ok I am reading the pdf version now and it is VERY enjoyable.

from the first chapter/interview

"Seibel: What about XScreenSaver—do you still work on that? Zawinski: I still write new screen savers every now and then just for kicks, and that’s all C.

Seibel: Do you use some kind of IDE for that?

Zawinski: I just use Emacs, mostly. Though recently, I ported XScreenSaver to OS X. The way I did that was I reimplemented Xlib in terms of Cocoa, the Mac graphics substrate, so I wouldn’t have to change the source code of all the screen savers. They’re still making X calls but I implemented the back end for each of those. And that was in Objective C, which actually is a pretty nice language. I enjoyed doing that. It definitely feels Java-like in the good ways but it also feels like C. Because it’s essentially C, you can still link directly with C code and just call the functions and not have to bend over backwards."

............................................

"Seibel: Six or seven being the whole Netscape development team or the Unix development team?

Zawinski: That was the whole client team. There were also the server folks who were implementing their fork of Apache, basically. We didn’t talk to them much because we were busy. We had lunch with them, but that was it. So we figured out what we wanted to be in the thing and we divided up the work so that there were, I guess, no more than two people working on any part of the project. I was doing the Unix side and Lou Montulli did most of back-end network stuff. And Eric Bina was doing layout and Jon Mittelhauser and Chris Houck were doing the Windows front end and Aleks Toti and Mark Lanett were doing the Mac front end for the pre–version 1.0 team. Those teams grew a little bit after that. But we’d have our meetings and then go back to our cubicles and be heads-down for 16 hours trying to make something work.

" ...........................................

"They thought just by virtue of being here, they were bound for glory doing it their way. But when they were doing it their way, at their company, they failed. So when the people who had been successful said to them, “Look, really, don’t use C++; don’t use threads,” they said, “What are you talking about? You don’t know anything.” Well, it was decisions like not using C++ and not using threads that made us ship the product on time. The other big thing was we always shipped all platforms simultaneously; that was another thing they thought was just stupid. “Oh, 90 percent of people are using Windows, so we’ll focus on the Windows side of things and then we’ll port it later.” Which is what many other failed companies have done. If you’re trying to ship a cross-platform product, history really shows that’s how you don’t do it. If you want it to really be cross-platform, you have to do them simultaneously. The porting thing results in a crappy product on the second platform.

They didn’t start from scratch with a blank disk but they eventually replaced every line of code. And they used C++ from the beginning. Which I fought against so hard and, dammit, I was right. It bloated everything;

...........................................

there's lots of interesting anecdotes and insights about his work with Peter Norvig at Berkeley, with Lucid and at Netscape and how he learned lisp and how he hates perl but uses it anyway and the hardest bug he ever encountered ( real doozy but i won't spoil the surprise for you) and so on .. And that's just Chapter 1.

I must be weird but I really enjoy reading stuff like that.

jasonkester2• 17 years ago

Thanks for the snippets. That's pretty much exactly what I was afraid it would be like. Kind of "Ghost of a new machine" without any of the things that made it interesting.

I can certainly see why this sort of thing would appeal to some folks. For me though, I don't think I could sit through a whole book of bitter guys complaining: "they rewrote my thing in C++ and it failed. Told you so!"

Founders was about inspiration. From what you show, Coders is not.

jalammar• 17 years ago

There's certainly something to learn about entrepreneurship from some of these guys.

I'm really looking forward to reading about Brad Fitzpatrick. He founded Live Journal, and made or started a lot of the software that powers many giant web startups (Memchached, MogileFS, OpenID...etc).

jeremyw2• 17 years ago

It's a crime this isn't on the Kindle. A book about hackers? When I emailed the author, he was not so interested. Books I bought for the Kindle last quarter: 20. Books I bought on paper: 0.

Update: It's also hasn't been submitted for Amazon Search Inside scanning or Google Book Search. If authors retain their digital rights, they can submit to both (plus Kindle) services quite easily from a variety of source formats -- circumventing ancient publisher pipelines. Alas.

unalone4• 17 years ago

I wouldn't consider buying this without a Kindle option. For me it's not worth the bulk, but a digital option would be welcome.

keyist2• 17 years ago

> GP: It's a crime this isn't on the Kindle.

> I wouldn't consider buying this without a Kindle option.

I completely don't grok how you could use delivery mechanism as the sole criteria for passing up on knowledge. It's a book for crying out loud, not some giant machine that takes up half a room.

EDIT: bad assumption, consider the above more a reply to GP than parent. That said I am always bemused by disdain for physical books. If you worry about bulk you can always read it then resell it or give it away. For books deemed worthy, the knowledge gained is well worth the sticker price even if you don't end up keeping it.

pre• 17 years ago

Never mind Kindle, I just want a paperback.

gigamonkey3• 17 years ago

Actually that's the only choice. I'm not sure why Amazon lists it as hardcover. Presumably they'll get that straightened out one of these days.

Tichy• 17 years ago

A comment later on seems to suggest there is a PDF version.

gigamonkey3• 17 years ago

It is going to be on Kindle. It's in Amazon's hands now--they have the files and its up to them to put it up. Unfortunately, according to my publisher, they sometimes take a long time--measured in months--to do their part. So maybe click the "I want this on my Kindle" link?

jamesbritt• 17 years ago

In searching for the book on Amazon I found this: http://www.amazon.com/Land-Lisp-Learn-Program-Game/dp/159327...

Sweet.

antirez• 17 years ago

Too much old / academia guys for my tastes. Underground / modern programming is a different kind of culture.

antipaganda3• 17 years ago

Ah, young padawan. How cute.

10ren3• 17 years ago

Re Knuth: "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked." - Gall's Law

- Tesla claimed that he could envisage an entire complex machine (and run it, so he could watch which parts wear out), without experimenting or prototyping or designing anything - as a contrast to Edison.

- Henri Poincaré claimed that complex new insights came to him fully formed (after immersing himself in their details), from his unconscious.

Re Simon Peyton Jones: Functional programming is the future of imperative programming and always will be.

Coders at work is finally available

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