- Published on
Understanding Software
- Authors
- Name
- Josh Haines
- @joshhaines
Understanding Software by Max Kanat-Alexander was an interesting book. The first thing that is clear as you start to read is the technical capability of the author. Max is/was the technical director of code health at Google. His title and the fact that he is doing this work for Google should tell you he knows his stuff. The second is reading a book made from a bunch of disparate blog posts isn't that fun.
The content in each of the articles is usually well written, developed from in-the-trenches experience, and intended to be helpful... but when read in rapid-fire succession, the value is lost. The book would likely only be useful to a small subset of the population at a non-software company, and even then it would be far more useful as a periodic email where one of these stories is sent every few weeks on a loop to remind you of some best practices. Overall, not a bad book, but not hugely useful.
