Andy Oram

Like many collections of works, the quality in this volume varied. I only remember one of the articles being particularly bad. A worthwhile number stand out as good.

The first four articles cover how to read software engineering research. I wish that I had read it in grad school. If you find yourself reading academic papers in computer science, it's worth reading these four articles.

The rest of the articles cover research about different areas of software engineering. If you're like me, your opinion of each article will be partially influenced by its quality and partially influenced by your interest in the topic. That said, there was a general pattern that the essays that tried to very narrowly investigate whether or not some piece of common sense wisdom were supported by evidence were, simultaneously, the best research, in terms of not overreaching, and the worst reading. :-)… (meer)

A mixed bag, but overall, worth reading.

Pros: I think programmers do not spend enough time studying the code of others, so books like this are an important step in encouraging the study of this craft. Each chapter of the book is written by a different (often famous) programmer, uses a different language, and discusses a different domain, so you get to see a huge range of different types of code. Multidimensional Iterators in NumPy, Distributed Programming with MapReduce, Beautiful Concurrency, and Writing Programs for the "Book" were my favorite chapters.

Cons: given all the different authors, the quality of the chapters is uneven. A few are boring; a few are interesting, but very tough to follow; a few just discuss high level principles and don't show much code. Also, while I recognize that beauty is subjective, for a prompt of "what's the most beautiful code you've ever seen", a few of the code snippets were questionable.… (meer)