Dreaming in code : two dozen programmers, three years, 4,732 bugs, and one quest for transcendent software
By, Rosenberg, Scott
Publisher: Crown
Class No.: 005.1 ROS
Accession No.: 020507
Year: 2007
Pages: 400 p.

Of the week: 01st Feb. 2010 to 06th Feb. 2010

Why is software so hard?
Hard to make well. Hard to deliver on time. Hard to use.

Our civilization runs on software. Yet the art of creating it continues to be a dark mystery, even to the experts, and the greater our ambitions, the more spectacularly we seem to fail.

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software sets out to understand why, through the story of one software project -- Mitch Kapor's Chandler, an ambitious, open-source effort to rethink the world of e-mail and scheduling.

I spent three years following the work of the Chandler developers as they scaled programming peaks and slogged through software swamps. In Dreaming in Code I tell their stories.