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Discussion on: 29 Must Read Books For Programmers

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Sam Fisher

Eric Raymond's other book "The Art of Unix Programming" is the best book I've ever read about software engineering principles and philosophy, even though it's cleverly disguised as a book about Unix. catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/

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bosepchuk profile image
Blaine Osepchuk

Thanks, I'll have to read that.

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elequ profile image
Elena Williams

Objectively I think the Eric Raymond book hasn't aged well (as someone with a hard copy that I thought was out of obsolete 5 years ago).

Further ESR himself has shown some pretty bad behaviour in recent years.

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Sam Fisher

Which Eric Raymond book are you refering to, Art of Unix Programming or Cathedral and the Bazaar? If it's the one about Unix I'd be particularly interested in the ways in which you've found it obsolete.

I didn't know about the controversy around his behavior, but it's clearly evident from a google search. That's really a shame and I'll see if I can learn more about it, esp before making an idol of his Unix book (which I really like).

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Blaine Osepchuk

Interesting. Care to elaborate on the shortcomings of "The Art of Unix Programming"?

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the_savage

What do you mean ESR's book hasn't aged well?

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elequ profile image
Elena Williams

Heya, I haven't read the Unix one, I was talking about the Cathedral and the Bazaar.

Honestly I wanted to like it and was stoked to come across it as there are so few books on the topic (and at the time also wasn't aware of ESR's now-bad rep, actually as an emacs user myself I though highly of him) and I was trying everything I could in the area because I was prepping a talk for PyCon US.

It pre-dates distributed version control (ie git) and comes from a time when freshmeat.net was the coolness for FOSS, how many people even remember that now? github wasn't even imaginable from the place where that book is written.

It's about emailing patches and old skool hax0r behaviour, that time is just past and really not that relevant to anyone who wasn't there.