Once upon a time, there was no GitHub, no iPhone, no AWS, no Android, no Google App Engine, no Stack Overflow, no Docker, no Kubernetes, no Rust, no Go, no Swift, no Kotlin, no Git, actually Subversion was barely starting to appear in the radar. Most importantly, there were no App Store yet.
It is a fairly well-known, but perhaps not broadly appreciated, fact that Apple's Macintosh could have been a very different computer. Sometimes known as the father of the Mac, sometimes as its eccentric uncle, the project was originally under the direction of computer scientist Jef Raskin. He managed to avoid Steve Jobs's ire for a while by not telling Jobs about the project, but after the Lisa failed and with Woz recovering from a plane crash, Steve needed something to do and checked in on what the former director of the documentation group was up to.
Some books are like mirrors. By that I mean that reading them involves a great deal of looking at oneself, both for praise and loathing. Taking a look back in time, reflecting on all those times we thought we were right and we were wrong, bringing back memories of times long gone, some of them painful, most hopefully fun and joyful.
You may be worried that I am going to talk about an author of books that are not about programming, and you are correct and incorrect. Correct, in that Hofstadter's books are not about programming (the intellectually hollow like to claim that they are not about anything at all, or that if you think you know what they are about then you did not understand them; this is untrue). Incorrect, in that Hofstadter's books and computer programs themselves are about the same thing.
Imagine that you are a fourth grader in California, in 1973. You were 6 or 7 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, and there were still astronauts up there just last year. On the radio you can hear Pink Floyd, Elton John or Led Zeppelin. One day your teacher receives an invitation for an experiment involving school kids in a laboratory somewhere in Palo Alto, a location 40 minutes south of San Francisco. Even stranger, the invitation comes from a well-known firm in the photocopier business.
I almost wrote this article not about McConnell, but Microsoft Press. Why? Because developers always have something to learn, books have been a great way to share information for centuries, so reading about computing is central to the software engineering experience. If you do not believe me, reflect on the activity you are undertaking right now, reading an online magazine about computing.
Some successful computer books have earned memorable nicknames. There is the "K&R" book, the “Gang of Four” book, and, to please generations of board and role game players, there are also the "Wizard Book", the "Dragon Book", and the "Dinosaur Book". There's the "Camel" book and the "Pickaxe" book. And then, with a decidedly more corporate look and feel, let us talk today about the "Pink Shirt" book, officially titled "The Peter Norton Programmer's Guide to the IBM PC." More corporate, yes, because the PC was after all a business machine coming from a business corporation.
Kent Beck might deny that Kent Beck needs an entry in the programmers' library. "All I did was rediscover what other people had done before," he might say, or "all I did was to interpret what Ward Cunningham was doing." But that discovery, that reinterpretation, is the most important part of the process. One person doing things differently is an oddball. Two are the beginning of a revolution.
If you wanted to write a book about any subject related to computers, but not specifically about a particular programming language, which language would you choose? For example: if you wanted to teach programming concepts (algorithms, patterns) to an absolute beginner, which language would convey your thoughts better? Say, if you had to explain algorithms that could be implemented in any Turing-complete language, which one would you pick, and why?
Let's start at the end. The last sentence in "NeXTSTEP Programming Step One: Object-Oriented Applications" by Simson L. Garfinkel and Michael K. Mahoney looks like this: "Go out and write a killer app!" This is slightly punchier than the way the same authors signed off in "Building Cocoa Applications: A Step-by-Step Guide": "Now go out and write a killer application!"