What to read to the programmer at your leisure
If you read English well, put aside specs and tutorials. Take a break from the next cookbook for the next framework and programming language. I bring to your attention my personal list of books about programming that are pleasant to read at your leisure: an interesting plot, life stories, instructive experience.
Dreaming in code
A book about developing a personal Chandler manager . Reading this book will give you the true pleasure of feeling pain. You will be ashamed of the heroes of this book, of your time spent meaninglessly, of crippled fates and a huge pile of money flying into the pipe.
A truly instructive reading that a millionaire (Mitch Kapor), who hit the jackpot in his first program, does not automatically become a management genius and an open source prophet. As for writing code, you first need to do at least something with the design. Before gathering programmers, you need to at least somehow put your idea into words. Two dozen programmers, one and a half thousand bugs in the baglist, five years of balabolstvo and imagination, projection and idle talk, puffing up cheeks and self-promotion. The output is a stillborn miscarriage, which was disgusting even to the creators themselves.
The cuckoo's egg
A great book from the mid 80s. Almost a spy story about hackers, military secrets, hacking networks, security holes, tracking calls.
The story in the book is led by astronomer Cliff Stoll , who, by chance, became the system administrator at the University of Berkeley. Examining the logs, he noticed a discrepancy in the budget of the used machine time of 75 cents. After that, the story unfolds as a detective on the verge of a farce, in which the FBI, NSA, military counterintelligence, the CIA and even the wife of an astronomer take part. From the book you will learn a lot of interesting things about how the US intelligence services evaluated cyber threats in the mid-80s (i.e. did not evaluate them at all), what difficulties it took to convince them of the real threat and make them move, or at least provide assistance. The story is real, which happened at the end of the Cold War.
After this incident, Cliff Stoll did not become a computer systems security specialist. He continued to study astronomy, but still gives interviews that can be watched on Youtube.
Showstopper
An interesting story about creating WindowsNT. From the book you will learn not only historical facts, but also get acquainted with how and who at Microsoft made historical decisions, what obstacles were in this gigantic project.
Disrupted
The hero of the book is a journalist for Newsweek magazine, who led a section with reviews on technological topics. In 2009, when the American economy was struggling with a historic financial crisis, it was kicked out of a staff reduction magazine. As a result, at the age of 50 with a ponytail, a person found himself without work and with no prospect of finding it: all paper magazines cut staff.
As a last chance, the journalist got a job at HubSpot , a startup related to Internet marketing. In his book, the author in very caustic words describes the entire boom of startups as a phenomenon close to fraud and an artificially inflated bubble. How startups powder their brains to young developers, according to what principle they recruit employees and how they are treated later, how venture capitalists will always stay on top even with a poor IPO, and employees who receive options will be without money, working almost for food.
Think of this book as a sober, skeptical look, like a cold shower, if someone taunts you, luring you into a “fast-growing promising company,” promising gold mountains in the form of options that will make you a billionaire tomorrow.