Book Review - Ship It! by Jared Richardson and William Gwaltney Jr.
Category Book Reviews
I haven't had the chance to read and review any books from the Pragmatic Programmers series. I decided to change that with the book Ship It! - A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects by Jared Richardson and William Gwaltney Jr. After finishing the book, I put in an order for a few more titles. If all the titles are this practical and useful, I'll be a happy camper...
Contents: Introduction; Tools and Infrastructure; Pragmatic Project Techniques; Tracer Bullet Development; Common Problems and How to Fix Them; Tip Summary; Source Code Management; Build Scripting Tools; Continuous Integration Systems; Issue Tracking Software; Development Methodologies; Testing Frameworks; Suggested Reading List; Index
Richardson and Gwaltney don't try to add yet another methodology that guarantees your life will be rosy. Basically, that methodology doesn't exist. But there are a number of best practices that they've found from real-world experience, and they share those here. The key word is "practical" (hence the "Pragmatic" part of the series title). Even if you can't necessarily adopt all of their suggestions, you can easily take one or two and merge them into your routine. Once they've changed the way you work, you'll be ready for a few new changes.
For instance, they are really big on automated build processes for your software development that requires a compile and packaging process. Having the process done manually means that it won't get done as often as it should, or it will be machine dependent. Taking the time to learn something like Ant can dramatically improve your effectiveness and productivity. Same with using continuous integration software. If your project is constantly being built and tested without intervention, it's a guarantee that new problems will be caught early and resolved quickly.
After reading this book, I'm planning on investigating the use of a wiki for "The List", as well as possibly downloading Bugzilla to have a formal issue tracking system. For me, that's the sign of a great book... you walk away with a few action items that will change what you do today, not sometime in the future. This is really a "required read" for all software developers, and the sooner you read it, the better...
I haven't had the chance to read and review any books from the Pragmatic Programmers series. I decided to change that with the book Ship It! - A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects by Jared Richardson and William Gwaltney Jr. After finishing the book, I put in an order for a few more titles. If all the titles are this practical and useful, I'll be a happy camper...
Contents: Introduction; Tools and Infrastructure; Pragmatic Project Techniques; Tracer Bullet Development; Common Problems and How to Fix Them; Tip Summary; Source Code Management; Build Scripting Tools; Continuous Integration Systems; Issue Tracking Software; Development Methodologies; Testing Frameworks; Suggested Reading List; Index
Richardson and Gwaltney don't try to add yet another methodology that guarantees your life will be rosy. Basically, that methodology doesn't exist. But there are a number of best practices that they've found from real-world experience, and they share those here. The key word is "practical" (hence the "Pragmatic" part of the series title). Even if you can't necessarily adopt all of their suggestions, you can easily take one or two and merge them into your routine. Once they've changed the way you work, you'll be ready for a few new changes.
For instance, they are really big on automated build processes for your software development that requires a compile and packaging process. Having the process done manually means that it won't get done as often as it should, or it will be machine dependent. Taking the time to learn something like Ant can dramatically improve your effectiveness and productivity. Same with using continuous integration software. If your project is constantly being built and tested without intervention, it's a guarantee that new problems will be caught early and resolved quickly.
After reading this book, I'm planning on investigating the use of a wiki for "The List", as well as possibly downloading Bugzilla to have a formal issue tracking system. For me, that's the sign of a great book... you walk away with a few action items that will change what you do today, not sometime in the future. This is really a "required read" for all software developers, and the sooner you read it, the better...
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Posted by Dan Sickles At 20:35:32 On 06/10/2005 | - Website - |
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