HN Books @HNBooksMonth

Another reading suggestion along those lines is "The design of design" by Fred Brooks (of Mythical Man Month fame). He discusses design approaches as uses his process of building his own house as the primary example:

https://www.amazon.com/Design-Essays-Computer-Scientist/dp/0...

A lot of people in this thread are focusing on technical tools, which is normal for a discussion of this type, but I think that focus is misplaced. Most technical tools are easily learnable and are not the limiting factor is creating good data science products.

https://towardsdatascience.com/data-is-a-stakeholder-31bfdb6...

(Disclaimer: I wrote the post at the above link).

If you have a sound design you can still create a huge amount of value even with a very simple technical toolset. By the same token, you can have the biggest, baddest toolset in the world and still end up with a failed implementation if you have bad design.

There are resources out there for learning good design. This is a great introduction and points to many other good materials:

https://www.amazon.com/Design-Essays-Computer-Scientist/dp/0...

Thanks for the link. Let me repay you with one:

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Essays-Computer-Scientist/dp/02...

Yes -- It's Fred Brooks' own "The Design of Design:" http://www.amazon.com/The-Design-Essays-Computer-Scientist/d...

Here are some links:

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

http://t.co/cJgpnX5B

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4BFC3F13B846707B

http://books.google.com/books/about/Mindstorms.html?id=HhIEA...

http://worrydream.com/

http://vpri.org/

Part 4 primarily of:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Design-Essays-Computer-Scientist/d...

⬐ vdm

s/ http://t.co/cJgpnX5B / http://tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/ /

⬐ Maro

By Fred Brooks, author of The Mythical Man-Month. I'm reading the book right now, it's great.

Here's a link to MMM in case someone hasn't read it:

http://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Software-Engineerin...

⬐ megaduck

I'm eagerly awaiting my copy. Brooks' previous work, 'The Mythical Man-Month', is still one of the best books ever written about building software. I re-read it every few years, just to keep those lessons fresh.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the book, Brooks was the manager of IBM's huge OS/360 project in the 60s. The system eventually shipped, but it was massively overbudget and late. He took the lessons he learned from the debacle, and wrote 'Mythical Man-Month' in 1975.

It's shocking how many of his insights still apply: Adding people slows down projects. Keep teams tight, and structured around your most productive programmers. It often pays to think deeply about a problem before you tackle it. Don't overbuild.

It's true that dynamic programming languages, tools like git, and rapid prototyping have made some of his examples feel dated. However, the underlying principles are still solid.

Hopefully 'The Design of Design' is a similar goldmine. Even if it's only half as good as MMM, it's still earned a slot on my bookshelf.

⬐ pchristensen

His talk from the 2007 OOPSLA (http://www.oopsla.org/oopsla2007/index.php?page=podcasts/ ) is also excellent.

⬐ jerf

"For those of you who aren't familiar with the book, ..."

... buy it already. Except for occasional references to kilobytes of RAM (what the heck are those? are they like gigabytes?), you'd think the book was written last week.

⬐ smikhanov

I don't think it seems written last week. It slowly becomes out of date -- very slow, much slower than any other book, but still.

Among the things that has significantly changed since the 20th anniversary edition are:

(a) agile/incremental methods in software development are now widespread. In the book, Brooks present himself as a big advocate of what could be called proto-agile, contrary to the waterfall model of his time, and

(b) internet service companies flourishing in the internet. The "release early, release often" model could not be practiced anywhere better than in the internet, and this mindset has a great impact on how we think about the software development in general (note that at the Brook's times there were no internet services at all)

⬐ hga

Hey, cache is the new RAM, RAM is the new disk, disk is the new tape. So all though 256KB L1 caches still mean something....

⬐ jluxenberg

Fred Brooks, for those who don't know, is the author of the software engineering book The Mythical Man Month ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month )

⬐ hga

Also the author of "No Silver Bullet": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet

I haven't read anything of his that wasn't worth reading and the MMM is still one of the very best.

⬐ cubicle67

No Silver Bullet is one of the essays in The Mythical Man Month book

⬐ hga

It was added to the 20th anniversary edition; I read it in the April 1987 issue of IEEE Computer with the wonderfully Gothic cover.

⬐ cubicle67

Thanks. I own the 20th anniversary edition and while I knew it had some extra content, including an update to the No Silver Bullet essay, I didn't realise NSB wasn't part of the original edition.

⬐ hga

You're welcome.

I found it very much worth buying the new MMM edition for his revisiting the "plan to throw one away, because you will" discussion on prototyping (e.g. see Joel's discussion on this). Very useful to me since I'd by then experienced most of the possible outcomes of this question.

He's not one to rest on his laurels and is to be commended for turning an epic disaster into a lifetime of suggesting to us with style and verve how we might manage to avoid such ourselves.

⬐ renkeyes

In case you're curious, the Table of Contents are listed below:

Copyright

About the Author

Preface

Part I: Models of Designing

Chapter 1. The Design Question

Chapter 2. How Engineers Think of Design -- The Rational Model

Chapter 3. What's Wrong with This Model?

Chapter 4. Requirements, Sin, and Contracts

Chapter 5. What Are Better Design Process Models?

Part II: Collaboration and Telecollaboration

Chapter 6. Collaboration in Design

Chapter 7. Telecollaboration

Part III: Design Perspectives

Chapter 8. Rationalism versus Empiricism in Design

Chapter 9. User Models -- Better Wrong than Vague

Chapter 10. Inches, Ounces, Bits, Dollars -- The Budgeted Resource

Chapter 11. Constraints Are Friends

Chapter 12. Esthetics and Style in Technical Design

Chapter 13. Exemplars in Design

Chapter 14. How Expert Designers Go Wrong

Chapter 15. The Divorce of Design

Chapter 16. Representing Designs' Trajectories and Rationales: In collaboration with Sharif Razzaque

Part IV: A Computer Scientist's Dream System for Designing Houses

Chapter 17. A Computer Scientist's Dream System for Designing Houses -- Mind to Machine

Chapter 18. A Computer Scientist's Dream System for Designing Houses -- Machine to Mind

Part V: Great Designers

Chapter 19. Great Designs Come from Great Designers: Not from Great Design Processes

Chapter 20. Where Do Great Designers Come From?

Part VI: Trips through Design Spaces: Case Studies

Chapter 21. Case Study: Beach House "View/360"

Chapter 22. Case Study: House Wing Addition

Chapter 23. Case Study: Kitchen Remodeling

Chapter 24. Case Study: System/360 Architecture

Chapter 25. Case Study: IBM Operating System/360

Chapter 26. Case Study: Book Design of Computer Architecture: Concepts and Evolution

Chapter 27. Case Study: A Joint Computer Center Organization: Triangle Universities Computation Center

Chapter 28. Recommended Reading

Acknowledgments

Bibliography