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Today was a book day
What did I find on my doorstep today? A big box full of books from Dorset House Publishing.
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Inexplicably, most of Gerald Weinberg‘s books are very hard to come by. He has written excellent books about Systems Thinking, the psychology of programming, congruent action, requirements, consulting… His books are required reading. So, I sent off an order directly to the publisher for myself, Laurent, Marko, Vera and Nico.The stack of books sitting now on my desk covers a lot of subjects: productivity, walkthroughs, requirements, systems thinking, measurement, psychology and organisational maturity. The two most ordered books are “The Secrets of Consulting” and “More Secrets of Consulting”.More on a few of those books later. |
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And on top of that box was another book: the paper copy of the Ruby on Rails book I’ve been reading in PDF pre-release form over the past month.We’ve started up development of an application to manage the registrations, payments and communications around the XP Day Benelux 2005 conference. This application uses Rails. We hope to see through the hype and learn if RoR is really so “Agile” as it claims. |
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And then a question about Domain Specific languages made me look up some more information about the Forth language. Forth was (a long long time ago) the first language I used that encouraged the programmer to build domain specific languages. Forth itself is a very primitive and simple language. But it allows you to create slightly higher level language elements or “words”. There is no (visible) distinction between those new words and the built-in words. And then you use those words to build slighly higher level words… Until you end up with a language that makes it easy to develop your application.So I went to look for Leo Brodie, whose books “Starting Forth” and “Thinking Forth” really made me understand this weird language and its even weirder way of programming. I wanted to buy these books for a long time, but they were out of print. And now I discover that “Thinking Forth” can be downloaded from Leo Brodie‘s site and has been re-published. I sent my order off to Amazon. Can’t wait ’till it gets here. Until then I’ve got some other books to keep me busy. |
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