Well, wish me luck, guys. Big red is in the shop for its midlife crisis...er...service

Just dropped-it-off on 2nd Street at Auto Tech Service for every maintenance service known to mankind, short of an engine + transmission rebuild.

>>sigh<< It's only money, right? Heck, cheaper than buying a new truck. Or a 300C

* * *

I haven't said this in almost 3 years of working here: Today is looking pretty darn boring. I've got some documentation to work on, but until I get some questions answered via email, I'm kinda stuck on my big workitems. Breezed through two technical books in the past two days:


Bitter Java


This book is basically a diatriabe about anti-patterns. Just as with all intelligent life, programmers find rules-of-thumb about how to do certain repetitive things in our code. We call these "Patterns" or "Design patterns". Well, in true thesis/antithesis form, Bruce Tate and his cronies came-up with this book to discuss anti-patterns, things not to do when designing/building/maintaining software. Worthy book, but very self-indulgent, wordy, breezy, and dense (much like this review :-) ).




Coder to Developer: Tools and Strategies for Delivering Your Software


Don't waste your money. This book is utter plaigarism of other people's ideas: Whole chapters are stolen without attribution, and none of the concepts are new. I need not buy this book to learn about brainstorming, mind-mapping, source-code control, unit testing, and how evil the guys in Marketing are. Essentially, this book is an overblow 'blog entry about one fellow's experience developing c#. There are some valuable best practices here, but it's just not worth the price of admission. It's not staying in my collection.



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