Bad management is shortsighted. What Naam does in this book is astounding, in a science-fiction book: he doesnt really seem to have an opinion. He is the author of the novels The Sol Majestic from Tor Books, as well as the Mancer trilogy and The Uploaded. How many technical books will be outdated after two years? Im sure you all have suggestions in the comments. Eventually, Earth will become uninhabitable, and as such the world has to come together to establish a spacebound colony. Its about, what, 2,000 words max? What Happens When The Documentation Sucks: It feels like there should be a fantasy series that handles this, because you never feel more like a D&D Wizard learning a new spell than when youre poring over someone elses half-assed documentation. Shes trying hard to work past her panic attacks to get a working space program up and running But her upper management is undermining her at every opportunity, and actively working against the integration of Elmas friends and coworkers. There is a vast river of mist that separates an empire. I'd also throw in Frederik Pohl: Gateway (and sequels). Welp, theres a flip side to that: people who treat anything computerized as though it were set in stone. It takes imagination to get beyond your own limited viewpoint. But what Bennett nails in this book is that feeling of technology stacking upon itself. Maybe management figures out halfway through that what you built isnt actually what they needed. So how do you find good fiction? Nexus would be exactly the same. For these less-technical skills, you will also find a plethora of resources claiming to help you in your quest for improvement. If you are a programmer, you are a freaking poet. Bad? Go figure.). Why made-up stories about imaginary characters? His Masters Voice by Lem- It will stop you trusting your data too much. Maintenance is, generally, tedium. On the other hand, Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poesy, said that poets lie the least. Because it deals what happens when programmers perfect the Nexus OSan operating system that ties directly into your brain. Nexus is the first in a trilogy, but trust me, youll want to read the whole thing. You can go blind staring at a thirty-page manual that documents the options for a single command let alone the options on the four hundred or so other commands. I think Douglas Adams did a spot on job of representing actual computer engineers. Indeed I find that there is more truth in Proust, albeit it is officially fictional, than in the babbling analyses of the New York Times that give us the illusions of understanding whats going on. I would of course second that. Great writers are, first and foremost, astute observers of life, and their insight into minds and motivations can become your insight. (Quite often, that hope is that you will slay the dreaded Legacy Code.) Shakespeares plays continue to last because they tap into something higher than facts. N.N. But the flourishing tech start-up economy of Bennetts steampunk city of Tevanne is fueled by scrivingsmagical instructions that alter reality. I know this is a terrible solution. Well, it didnt. And you get to hunt through code trying to find the error while the vice president of your company (salary $140k annually, plus three weeks vacation) calls up and screams in your ear. There are people who are paid to do nothing but make computers run sleeker, harder, better, fasterand if you want to get there, youre going to have to have a fundamental understanding of the keepalive timeouts and the proxy caches. When you look at something like the Internet, its been both a force for unalloyed good and an enabler of seething evils. In that spirit, here are some recommendations from myself and fellow Lullabots: Shakespeare. At worst, it can lie to you in ways that twist your expectations about reality by twisting what is good and beautiful. Great book. The only thing by Lem that I've read is The Cyberiad, but it was hilarious and definitely recommended. No, most bugs are mild, obscure things like User is logged out every Thursday at 10:13 pm. If youre lucky, you patch a widespread inconvenience with a two-line fix and look like a genius. So what novel best feels like working on legacy code? The best writers can craft characters so real that they feel like flesh and blood, and many of those people can be similar to actual people you know. What if youre spinning up a web server that needs to handle 50,000 users connecting all at once? The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem. He loves spending his time reading, writing, playing with his three kids, and eating lots of ice cream. These are usually not terribly exciting bugs. What you dont tell them is that even if they approve the eighteen-month project, their fix will in fact probably never get implemented, because the legacy code has outlasted previous teams of management, and will outlast them, and will probably outlast the heat death of the universe. But programming does require expertise, because while no individual portion tends to be indecipherable, its putting them all together that requires many overlapping knowledge bases. (Non-programmers are astonishingly incoherent when it comes to explaining what they want, and often demand you to do the exact opposite of what they need.) And you do. It can warp the lens through which you view life. One aspect I particularly like is that the main character is a computer programmer. This is not a unique take. (RIP, Rebecca Alison Meyer, forever embedded in the Internet as #rebeccapurple.). The latter is closer to the truth, even though it might betray a pessimistic view of humanity. The best words in the best order could also be a definition of good, clean code. (One of my favorite series, The Murderbot Diaries, features a cyborg killing machine who loves both soap operas and hacking into cameras, so Murderbot is certainly well-balanced.) Or you follow the documentation note-for-note, levelling up your baking skills until you understand this Bakewell tart so thoroughly that youre sure Paul Hollywood himself would give you a handshake over it, only to discover that theyve discontinued that brand of Bakewell tart and the new children 3.0 wont eat it. Well, maybe not, but this does mean that a subset of the fiction you read should be poetry, though any good fiction will help you increase your vocabulary. While this still wont necessarily make it easy to name things properly - even the best poets struggle and bleed over the page before they find what they are looking for - it might make it easier. But thats not always possible; sometimes outside forces require sub-par hotfixes, and sometimes the solution you really want is too expensive (in terms of man-hours or hardware) to accomplish. Sam is a made up character. Secretaries will mail each other spreadsheets of invoice numbers that they looked up, painfully, one by one, when you could have literally added one control to the search bar. Good fiction can help you navigate real life. Theyre never pretty sure they understood most of whats happening here, and what they understood fixed the code so far, so time to do the old cut-and-copy and call response code YOLO. Every time anytime mentions programming and speculative fiction, the words CHARLIE STROSS ATROCITY ARCHIVES erupts from their mouths like the Deep Ones crying out to their undersea master Cthulhu. And theres a lot more horrible gargoyles and soul-sucking shadows and vampires than youre likely to encounter in troubleshooting your Apache stack. So what novel feels most like finding your users contorting themselves into pretzels over a UI bug you could have fixed in twenty minutes? Good authors of fiction are ready to be your personal trainers. You can own a hammer, be really proficient with it, and even have years of experience using it, but it takes imagination to design a houseand know when to use that hammer for that house. Is Nexus good? This allows us to improve and customize your browsing experience. And a plucky kid is tasked with stealing an important artifact that, of course, is more than it appears. They generally dont type in inscrutable commands we found on our servers in the hopes that this doesnt actually summon a demon (or, in our case, install a malicious daemon on our hard drive). novels for programmers, And theres multiple times when the characters face down impossible uses of scriving that, when broken down, not only seem plausible, but almost downright inevitable in how they got used. To withdraw your consent, see Your Choices. One of the hardest problems in programming is naming things. That is a description of anger that rings true and sticks. It turns out that whats happened to Kos Everburning is very much a bug in every (computerized) sense of the term, and much of the novel concerns itself with forms of data recoveryor, more accurately, retrieving the contracts that fuel a gods power. Poetry will just intensify the phenomenon. I also recommend The Man Who Folded Himself, by David Gerrold. Bad management undermines you, because your very realistic complaints are an impediment to the fantasy view of reality theyre desperately trying to peddle to their superiors. No individual part is all that difficult. As I said, bad management doesnt always destroy a project. Kij Johnsons prose is always dazzling and sparse, and her mastery has never been more on form than in this novella, which isnt so much about code as it is that sense of immensity you feel, looking straight on at something that is so monumentally difficult that you might never finish it. i can't stand it. A time travel story done properly. Maybe another manager takes over and doesnt believe in your project, so he starves it of resources until you dwindle to dust. Jane Austens novels are some of the most insightful reflections on human nature. And thenif youre luckysome hotshot programmer comes along and shows you how you can spin three plates in tandem to make your code do something you never thought it could do before, something more powerful and intoxicating and whoa we are flying high on the narcotic of our own tech. So if you want a little critique with your intrigue, well, here ygo. As is usual with fantasy books that evoke programming, theres a lot more magical ninjas involved than youre likely to see scanning Stack Overflow. Pick any Skill to Practice from a wide range of options available. Programming is as much a creative endeavor as it is technical mastery, and creativity requires a functioning imagination. More specifically, the bang that ends the Earth. One that I'm amazed nobody has mentioned: The Turing Option, by Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky. So what novel feels most like dealing with patch notes? But some of it will. Fire Upon the Deep! You have probably met a person like this. You could learn that in an afternoon. Three Parts Dead is technically about magical lawbut it turns out that magically-enforced laws turn out to have a lot of overlap with programming, even if the protagonists think of themselves as contract negotiators. Some days you feel like youre programming a dreamthat youre wrestling with more of an idea than an outcome.