Peopleware Papers, The: Notes on the Human Side of Software

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic - well worth reading
Review: Fantastic : I wish I'd read these articles when they were originally published over the period 1992-1995.

There are 77 essays, which even today, 10 years after their original publication, have lost none of their relevance to those working in the field.

There was barely a single essay that I didn't get some benefit from reading, but I particularly liked the essays on.
- Cowboy Coders
- Collaboration
- All of Section 4, Tools, Models and Methods, which gives a number of very visionary essays on CASE
- Reuse
- Usable Objects
- Use Cases

I can't recommend the book enough; I'm certainly going to think twice before I lend it out to anyone, in case it never comes back!

Rating:
Summary: Social Issues in Software Development
Review: There are few books that discuss the social issues of software development. This book not only does that, but it has a well-rounded variety of topics.

You don't have to be interested in every topic to get something out of this book. I thought this book would have been worthwhile if I'd only been interested in one or two of the groups of topics.

Since this is a collection of his articles, the chapters tend to be short, so this is a book that tends to be fairly easy-to-read and appropriate for most of the people you might want to recommend it to.

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining and Inspiring Bedside Reading
Review: This book is a collection of Constantine's columns published in a variety of magazines. I was not familiar with his work previously, and this book shows why he was a successfuly columnist: In each of his 4-6 page chapters, he successfully drives a particular point home.

This book is probably not suitable as a text book for any particular topic, but it can get your thought process in various disciplines started. Since the chapters are very short and independent, it is ideally suited as bathroom or bedside reading material. What works a bit to the detriment of this strategy is that the chapters are sorted by topic; counterintuitive as this may sound, in a book like this, I would prefer for the topics to be mixed up.

A slight peeve is the unsealed paper binding of this book, which smudges easily. I hope publishers are reconsidering their use of this binding, which seems to be on the increase.