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Summary: An Inmate's View of Life in an IT Dungeon
Review: Software Exorcism is a mind-dump by an experienced maintenance programmer. Bill Blunden lists all the horrendous coding techniques he's come across in commercial software, while offering detailed tips on debugging and optimizing code. The very useful code examples are written in C++, C or assembly language, mostly on an Intel platform.The aim of the book is to help computer science and engineering students jump the chasm to corporate life by giving them the real-life vocabulary and practices that they can expect to meet over the first few years of their professional life. Much of what they will learn is to forget most of what they've been taught in college -- from terse variable names to an infatuation with recursive routines. Amongst the challenges that Blunden expands upon are the realities of corporate and office politics. Here are all the gory details of the name-and-blame game, information hiding and "Sysyphean" tasks aimed at pressuring people to quit. Ultimately, Blunden concludes, software engineering, as a career path, has become a "quaint anachronism" and programming is "strictly a short-term occupation". If he's right, then it's a pity that this book probably won't be seen by most CS students until they're ready to graduate after paying all that tuition. Also recommended: Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert L. Glass
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