This afternoon I stopped by the Pleasanton Library to hear my friend Scott Rosenberg, managing editor of Salon.com, talk about his first book, Dreaming in Code. (Here’s the website Scott set up for the book.) About 40 people turned out, with more than a few seniors and programmers in the audience.
The book’s official release came last week, he reports in his WordYard blog, and today’s appearance followed talks at Kepler’s and Yahoo!
I’ve bumped into Scott over the months during his three years being an embedded reporter in the midst of Mitch Kapor’s (that’s KAY-por) Chandler project, an open-source project to create an application that could handle email, appointments and notes seamlessly. Writing about software development is about an unsexy a topic for a book as one can imagine, and yet Scott manages to bring a deft narrative touch and human dimension to the effort. Plus, there are enough bits of history and perspective in here to make it a worthy read for any technophile. For example, he paints in some valuable background about the origins of Linux and such seminal works as Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
On occasion, the subject matter turns dense for general readers, with acronyms such as RAP (Repository Access Protocol), CVS (Concurrent Versions System) and ZODB (Zope Object Database) cropping up. But that’s the price one pays when following the trajectory of an important, years-long software project and the foibles of writing code. Ultimately, the book is less about programming than about the challenges of innovation and creativity in a team setting.
This isn’t a full-on review, just an entry to report that I’m enjoying reading Dreaming in Code. Paul Boutin has a review of the book in the Wall Street Journal, reprinted here. Scott Berkun reviews it here. And Scott collects other early reviews here.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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