Another Good Book (This one for programmers.)

I wanted to post about another good book. This one is for programmers. The book is entitled “Dreaming In Code”. It’s about the process of writing software, and follows a team developing an open source application called Chandler. (Chandler is a handy task manager that I started using after I began reading the book.) The book is valuable to me because it identifies a lot of the pitfalls and challenges in writing software.

Here is the web page for the book on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Dreaming-Code-Programmers-Transcendent-Software/dp/1400082471/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235576792&sr=1-1

Here is an excerpt from page 148 of the book, which identifies a pitfall programmers can fall into when testing a software for robustness:

Beyond that, it is the programmer’s job to imagine unlikely scenarios…Programmers call these edge cases, and they are often where the bugs hide. Trained to imagine them with exhaustive thoroughness, programmers’ pragmatic, gut-sense awareness of what edge cases really mater can get rusty. They spend so much brainpower out at the edge that they loose sight of the center.