peculiar books reviewed - West of the Mississippi

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peculiar books reviewed

A collection of 6 posts

Peculiar Books Reviewed: Grigori Medvedev's "The Truth About Chernobyl"

Peculiar Books Reviewed: Grigori Medvedev's "The Truth About Chernobyl"

Let me tell you a joke. > Days after the Chernobyl plant melted down General Tarakanov, aware of the extreme importance of clearing the reactor roof of radioactive graphite ahead of the weather, began accepting offers of robots from other nations to do the job. The West Germans, very confident, delivered

Peculiar Books Reviewed: Henry S. F. Cooper Jr.'s "Thirteen: The Apollo Flight that Failed"

Peculiar Books Reviewed: Henry S. F. Cooper Jr.'s "Thirteen: The Apollo Flight that Failed"

In the first Peculiar Books Reviewed we discussed David A. Mindell's delightful book "Digital Apollo" and, in particular, took from the book this lesson: a technical system which puts the human component in a position of supremacy over the machine is more capable of achieving the aim of the system

Peculiar Books Reviewed: Francis Spufford's "Backroom Boys"

Peculiar Books Reviewed: Francis Spufford's "Backroom Boys"

What is the soul of software engineering as a discipline? That is, who is it that the software engineer can esteem? What characteristics are laudable and worthy of emulation? Physicists have their heroes: Niels Bohr, say, careful to the point of being paralyzed by indecision but brilliant nonetheless, or Richard

Peculiar Books Reviewed: Alain de Botton's "Status Anxiety"

Peculiar Books Reviewed: Alain de Botton's "Status Anxiety"

I went to a conference earlier this month where everyone was uniformly lovely and brilliant and interesting and everyone agreed that it was an excellent conference and damn near everyone felt like surely, soon, all the other uniformly lovely and brilliant and interesting people would realize that they, and they

Peculiar Books Reviewed: Charles Perrow's "Normal Accidents"

Peculiar Books Reviewed: Charles Perrow's "Normal Accidents"

Wheels roll over feet, kitchen knives slice into fingers, heaters catch houses on fire, software crashes losing work and chemical plants blow up. Each of these things is man-made and each is performing actions they were not intended to perform. As Charles Perrow terms it in Normal Accidents: Living with

Peculiar Books Reviewed: David A. Mindell's "Digital Apollo"

peculiar books reviewed

Peculiar Books Reviewed: David A. Mindell's "Digital Apollo"

This is the first of a series of monthly book reviews intended to make the case for expanding the canon of Software Engineering texts. Don't get me wrong, books like Code Complete or the Mythical Man Month are venerable and valuable, but I contend that the corpus should be more