Two books

A member of a mailing list I’m on recently asked: what two books should be on every engineer’s bookshelf? Here’s my answer.

Many software engineers, the ones described toward the end of Code Complete 2, would benefit most from Donald Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming and Computers and Typesetting. It is truly astounding that one man has contributed so comprehensively to the art of variable-height monitor configurations.

If, to misquote Bill Hicks, “you’ve got yourself a reader”, then my picks are coloured by the fact that I’ve been trying to rehabilitate Object-Oriented Design for the last few years, by re-introducing a couple of concepts that got put aside over the recent decades:

1. Object orientation; and
2. Design.

With that in mind, my two recommendations are the early material from that field that I think shows the biggest divergence in thinking. Readers should be asking themselves “are these two authors really writing about the same topic?”, “where is the user of the software system in this book?”, “who are the users of the software system in this book?”, and “do I really need to choose one or other of these models, why not both or bits of both?”

1. “Object-Oriented Programming: an evolutionary approach” by Brad Cox (there is another edition with Andrew Novobilski as a co-author). Cox’s model is the npm/CPAN model: programmers make objects (“software ICs”), describe their characteristics in a data sheet, and publish them in a catalogue. Integrators choose likely-looking objects from the catalogue and assemble an application out of them.

2. “Object-Oriented Software Construction” by Bertrand Meyer. Meyer’s model is the “software engineering” model: work out what the system should do, partition that into “classes” based on where the data should naturally live, and design and build those classes. In designing the classes, pay particular attention to the expectations governing how they communicate: the ma as Alan Kay called the gaps between the objects.