

Coders at work is finally available - oscardelben
http://codersatwork.com/

======
jasonkester
Founders at Work is one of those books that I keep finding myself re-reading
over and over. There is so much good stuff there.

For some reason, the description of this book just doesn't inspire me to read
it. It's hard to articulate why that is, since it's in the same style as
Founders, and it interviews a similar set of people.

Maybe it's just that I've heard enough from that generation of programmers.
Maybe I've just heard enough from _all_ programmers. Maybe, talking about
programming is simply not interesting at all. I don't know.

Tell me about how you launched a billion dollar company from your apartment
with stolen office chairs and I'm there. Tell me how you _really_ like
pointers, and I sort of lose interest.

~~~
axod
Yeah I feel similar. Programming isn't _that_ hard :/

Building a successful startup, selling stuff, getting investment etc etc -
They seem orders of magnitude harder than programming.

~~~
plinkplonk
" Programming isn't that hard"

Whoa! doesn't that depend very much on what exactly you mean by "programming"
and which specific program you are trying to create ?

~~~
axod
Pick a webapp. Lets take twitter or facebook, or even youtube. I'm sure
there's some really interesting problems when you drill down, and it'd take a
fair while to conquer the problems, but it's just a large mountain - just
takes longer to climb. I'm sure most of us _could_ build a
facebook/twitter/youtube clone if we decided to.

The hard bit of course would be getting people to use it.

The world is absolutely littered with fantastic clever well written programs,
that no one uses. This is why I think programming is far easier than
convincing someone to use it and all that other non-programming stuff, and why
I personally am far more interested in the non-technical side of the equation.
In comparison, the technical side is trivial.

~~~
sanswork
People always assume this with sites like youtube/facebook/twitter/etc but
they forget that the most interesting problems tend to come from the
requirements of scaling.

From my experience most people seem to have their wall at which point they
can't possibly conceive of a better way to scale X until someone comes along
and goes "Try this". My experience also says this level is pretty low for most
people.

------
jeremyw
It's a crime this isn't on the Kindle. A book about hackers? When I emailed
the author, he was not so interested. Books I bought for the Kindle last
quarter: 20. Books I bought on paper: 0.

Update: It's also hasn't been submitted for Amazon Search Inside scanning or
Google Book Search. If authors retain their digital rights, they can submit to
both (plus Kindle) services quite easily from a variety of source formats --
circumventing ancient publisher pipelines. Alas.

~~~
pre
Never mind Kindle, I just want a paperback.

~~~
gigamonkey
Actually that's the only choice. I'm not sure why Amazon lists it as
hardcover. Presumably they'll get that straightened out one of these days.

------
mapleoin
Masterminds of Programming[0] is another cool book on the subject.

[0] <http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596515171/>

~~~
Kaizyn
Yes, this was a really good book. I suspect that Coders at Work will be a
little better though because the interviewer(s) in Masterminds seemed a bit
weak in places and not really able to keep up with the interviewees in the
discussions.

------
ssn
No sample/preview chapter?

------
10ren
Re Knuth: _"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved
from a simple system that worked."_ \- Gall's Law

\- Tesla claimed that he could envisage an entire complex machine (and run it,
so he could watch which parts wear out), without experimenting or prototyping
or designing anything - as a contrast to Edison.

\- Henri Poincaré claimed that complex new insights came to him fully formed
(after immersing himself in their details), from his unconscious.

Re Simon Peyton Jones: Functional programming is the future of imperative
programming and always will be.

------
amix
I wish it was possible to buy a PDF version.

~~~
jsteele
I believe the ebook option at <http://apress.com/book/view/1430219483> is a
PDF.

~~~
vsync
I went there literally ready to punch in the CC#.

But $21?! I might as well pay the extra $9 and have a nice physical artifact
to show for it.

~~~
philips
Or you can save a dollar and get the hardback from Amazon. O'Reilly is having
the same issue setting prices for their eBooks against Amazon[1].

[1]
[http://getsatisfaction.com/oreilly/topics/amazon_hardcopy_is...](http://getsatisfaction.com/oreilly/topics/amazon_hardcopy_is_cheaper_than_ebook)

------
axod
>> "Crockford is, by nature, a simplifier and a tidier. He invented JSON, the
data interchange format widely used in Ajax applications"

Does anyone else find it irritating to read "He _invented_ JSON", which isn't
true at all? He _popularized_ and called out JSON which already existed.

~~~
markkanof
Crockford actually makes the explicit distinction that he discovered JSON vs
inventing it in a presentation he gave called "The JSON Saga".

[http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=crockford...](http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=crockford-
json)

It seems like other people often say that he invented it, even though he
doesn't say that.

------
DanielStraight
Awesome. I'm pre-ordering the second I get home from work... or maybe during
lunch.

~~~
apgwoz
There's no reason to pre-order, since it was released today. I _did_ pre-order
last week, and Amazon told me it'd be shipped on the 15th, _sigh_.

~~~
mhb
Except that Amazon still shows it as pre-order (10:09 AM EST).

~~~
gigamonkey
It has now switched from "Pre-order" to "Add to Shopping Cart".

edit: And then they switched it back. Grrrr.

~~~
mncaudill
It's up for me now.

Looking forward to reading the book, Peter.

------
jamesbritt
In searching for the book on Amazon I found this: [http://www.amazon.com/Land-
Lisp-Learn-Program-Game/dp/159327...](http://www.amazon.com/Land-Lisp-Learn-
Program-Game/dp/1593272006/)

Sweet.

------
Maro
Funny, it was also pirated today. (I have an RSS watch for "darksiderg" on
Mininova.)

~~~
Maro
To all the downvoters: Guess what, I live in Eastern Europe, so I can't go to
the local bookstore to flip through books. English language books (most good
stuff written today) doesn't get imported at all. Books that are popular in
the US are translated (terrible for technical books) about 5-10 years after
their original release date. So guess what, I download the books, look at
them, and order the good ones (about 5 every few months) from Amazon and
Alibris.

~~~
jacquesm
I think the downvotes may have something to do with the fact that you gave a
bunch of information that make it very easy for others to download the book as
well. Effectively you have probably cost the author a bunch of potential
sales.

------
antirez
Too much old / academia guys for my tastes. Underground / modern programming
is a different kind of culture.

~~~
antipaganda
Ah, young padawan. How cute.

------
amichail
Only two in the list are women. However, one could argue that almost all
programmers will be women in the far future.

That's because as AI becomes more sophisticated, programming will become more
like teaching.

And teaching is something that mostly interests women today.

~~~
jacquesm
> However, one could argue that almost all programmers will be women in the
> far future.

I find that hard to believe.

> And teaching is something that mostly interests women today.

I'm all for more balance but to either relegate women to teaching because
'that mostly interests women' (for which I have no evidence, my classes were
pretty much 60/40 men/women, with the men predominant in the
maths/physics/chemistry department, but that was a while ago) or to assume
that men are not interested in it (they are), whichever way I slice it I can't
make much sense of it.

Would you mind explaining ?

~~~
amichail
Men (and women) become professors to do research -- not to teach. In fact, top
research universities try to minimize the undergraduate teaching that
professors have to do.

~~~
jacquesm
The mission of a university - and of everybody in it, from the janitor to the
director - is to further our collective knowledge.

That means that every professor, whether teaching, researching or both,
irrespective of their gender is engaged in this. Some professors put the
accent on research, others spend as much of their time teaching as they can,
for most of them it is a mix.

I do not see any argument why men or women would be predisposed to go one way
or the other.

My suspicion is that you have some bias that you should get rid of to see
things more in perspective.

Maybe this is your personal experience (which is always a possibility) but the
world is a very large place and very few generalizations hold if you have a
large enough sample.

Yours will almost certainly not stand the test of being exposed to the world
the way I see it.

