>Last night I was down in the basement to replace the furnace filter and took a detour rummaging through the boxes of books down there. These are the personal favorites (plus a few which stubbornly remain in my mental To Be Read stack despite years in an unread state) which survived a major book purge last year in which I donated hundreds of books to the library. Flip, flip, flip, then my hand stopped on "The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. I picked it up, read the first few pages, and am rereading it now for about the fourth time. With all the pissiness here lately I thought I would recommend it in the spirit of positive karma.

I remember reading it some time in the eighties, translated and serialized in one of the (then few) computer monthlies. I only had a ZX Spectrum then, and figured my knowledge of the stuff was amateurish, but then realized that I actually understood what was going on in the book. Maybe it was after 1986, when I met my first machine with a disk :).

Anyway, the spirit is pretty much what I later encountered in my direct contact with the programming teams, working in software companies and, not accidentally, in Kerry Nietz's book. It may not be as exciting anymore nowadays, but I guess the spirit is still haunting our monitors...