I’ve decided for once to read a novel about software. This book is about the story of Chandler, a piece of software that was a dream that didn’t quite came true.
Content and opinions
The audience of this book is mainly people that do not know much about software but that want to know about a story that drove people for several years. There are a lot of fkashbacks inside software history or parenthesises on software.
Also the book is acclaimed by the critics, I didn’t find it that much interesting. It is very difficult to read the whole book, as the the thread goes from history to context to side stories to the main stories, sometimes after each parenthesis. This is tiresome, and is a drawback for a good book when you want to relax a little bit. Here, you won’t be able to do so, you’ll have to keep focusing on what the author wants to tell you (and that’s not really easy).
Conclusion
Not as much fun as I expected, but still, there are some passages that may be worth it for managers that don’t want to read a book on software project management. I won’t recommend it, but you may still want to learn from other people’s mistakes.
If you want to give this type of book a second try, I’d recommend “The soul of a new machine” by Tracy Kidder. It’s about hardware development (building a 32-bit minicomputer) instead of software, but it beautifully captures the atmosphere of working on a large tech project.