Postcards From The Software Island

The art of writing creatively about the world of software-not the type that's tiresome and ponderous, but the kind that is inspiring even as it offers substantial value and learning-has languished for far too long. Fear not. This book is here to set things straight. At the heart of this book-and presented in the form of eight "postcards" which the author writes and dispatches to you from a fabled software island-is the undeniable message that the craft of programming is at once creative and disciplined.Writing code and, just as importantly, writing about code, ought to go hand-in-hand. One informs the other inescapably: Think of Dutch artist M. C. Escher's beguilingly memorable "Drawing Hands" lithograph. We need to put the fun back in our tech pursuits. And the story which aims to show how this can be achieved, by way of example, simply could not remain sealed under lock any longer...If the past seven years of writing and publishing essays online (at the ProgrammingDigressions blog) has taught the author anything, it is this: Readers just like you are thirsty for a draft from the fountain that is at once informed by and suffused with the inescapable partnership-however inscrutable to the untrained eye it may be-which actively remains at play during myriad tech pursuits, writing code notably among them. Now that story has been unsealed and is being told by way of the eight "postcards" which make up the book.