Dreaming in Code

An interesting read, half the story of a typical start-up trainwreck and half a philosophical meditation on why, exactly, “software is hard”. Rosenberg takes the time to explain quite a lot about coding and programmer culture in layman's terms – which is redundant for most programmers, while still being technical enough that I'm not sure, say, my parents would be able to get through it. I think the ideal audience is entrepreneurs and those who find themselves in the position of needing to manage programmers; it would also be a good book to assign undergraduate CS students, since it includes both a readable primer of software engineering methods and a sense of what it means to choose programming as a career.

Five years old as of now (it was published in 2007), so it's charmingly dated in some respects. The book ended on a positive note, but the software project that formed the center of the narrative seems to have quietly vanished off the face of the earth; from a purely literary perspective, I wish someone had written a blog post or some kind of wrap-up to serve as an epilogue.