Review Title: A Funny and Cathartic Read for Anyone who Programs [ View All Reviews ]

If you're programer, you have to read this book. Maybe you'll learn something in it. Maybe you won't, but you'll feel a whole lot better about every programming screw up you've ever made after reading this because this book shows you how people who are probably smarter, richer, and more talented than you end up making the exact same mistakes you make and suffer from the same frustrations that you have with that bug that just wont go away.

To a programmer, this book reads like a slasher horror movie. You have moments when you think, "No don't open that door" fully knowing what's about to happen. When the inevitable carnage comes, I found myself chuckling with elation that I was far from the first person to ever make that mistake.

Perhaps because the product he was covering in the book never made it to completion in the time he had to write the book, Scott Rosenberg fills the pages with lots of programming anecdotes and aphorisms from the short history of computing. The result is a book that's informative, entertaining, and a easy read regardless of your degree of technical literacy. Although programmers may find this book especially entertaining, it's clearly written for a general audience to pose the questions: Why is software so hard to make and why are programmers and programming culture so odd?

He doesn't give a specific answer to these questions in the book, but in radio interviews with him to promote the book, he provides a very succinct answer. It's because good software is artwork, but unlike artwork, it's not enough for it to be beautiful or shocking. You have to turn it on and it has to work. It's a paradox of something that has to be abstract and literal at the same time.