books

I’ve recently been dealing with legacy code refactoring both in theory and in practice: while I’m continuing some work on the igraph R package, I’ve started reading Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers, that had been in my to-read pile for months. In this post, I’ll summarize some ideas from both the book and my work. “Cover and modify” with “characterization tests” When you start modifying your rusty code, how do you ensure you do not break existing and important behaviour inadvertently?

I recently re-read Nadia Eghbal’s Working in public. This time around, I noticed her mention of the book “Producing open source software” by Karl Fogel. It is a book about the people aspects of open-source projects, including money, and it reads like a sort of guide. Complying with my first-edition-curse, I did not notice there was a second edition online and soonish to be in print apparently, so I bought and read a second-hand first edition.

As mentioned about a million times on this blog, last year I read Git in practice by Mike McQuaid and it changed my life – not only giving me bragging rights about the reading itself. 😅 I decided to give Pro Git by Scott Chacon a go too. It is listed in the resources section of the excellent “Happy Git with R” by Jenny Bryan, Jim Hester and others. For unclear reasons I bought the first edition instead of the second one.

In my quest to having reading notes on the tech books I read, and while waiting for code to run, I recently re-read The Pragmatic Programmer by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt. That book, whose second edition was published in 2019, offers an overview of many topics useful to programmers, from the idea of taking responsability, to testing, tooling, etc. Not my favorite tone I’m not the biggest fan of the tone used in the book, that feels a bit patronizing to me.

Another month, another long train trip enjoyed in the company of great books, among which a work-related one, Kill it with fire by Marianne Bellotti. As indicated by its subtitle “Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)”, the book deals with handling legacy computer systems. The focus is on bigger projects (including serious internal politics) than what I usually deal with, but there’s some valuable lessons for any project size in there.

While preparing materials for teaching Git a few months ago, I re-read Suzan Baert’s excellent post about Git and GitHub, where she mentioned having read “Git in Practice” by Mike McQuaid. I added the book to my Momox alerts, where it got available a few weeks later. The book source is on GitHub. The book isn’t too heavy, so I took it with me on a long train journey! 🚋

When I see a book recommendation somewhere, be it for work or leisure, I often either order the book or set an alert in my favorite online second-hand bookstore. By the time I am notified the book is available, I sometimes don’t remember why I listed it! That’s what happened for the book A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout. I decided to trust my past self and buy it.