Re: Timeless Classics of Software Engineering

MMM is of course fantastic. And I would also put Code Complete on the short list (and there's a new edition coming soon). MMM is more of a high-level thing, while Code Complete starts at a lower level but is so packed with good advice that I always get something out of it when rereading.

I also HIGHLY recommend McConnell's "Software Project Survival Guide", which is a great companion volume to "Code Complete". His "Rapid Development" is another great collection of software construction knowledge. I would place McConnell at the top of my short list of "authors I will read whenever I see them put out something new".

In fact, McConnell's approach in Code Complete (and his later efforts as editor of IEEE Computer magazine) inspired me to be extremely lazy when making a reading list--and just took his. Steve's company, Construx software, has an established reading list that's available on the web... or was; their 1.0 version of their reading ladder is now only available to "website members" (free registration but still a little annoying). You can get some idea from their current program (the one for a sample developer is at

http://www.construx.com/professionaldev/individual/pdlsampleplans/sampledev.php

...but I liked the "annotated bibliography" aspect of the v1 ladder--aside from having better presentations of each of the materials, it also included a list of seminal articles from software history and was just a great list of resources. HIGHLY recommended, and probably worth registering on the site just to have. I read pretty much everything on there (or at least one of the options whenever it said "this book or this book").

-->VPutz
Received on Thu Jul 29 2004 - 15:49:30 CEST