Friday, July 15, 2011

Interesting book about engineering

When I attended June's Google NYC Tech Talk on performance bugs, speaker Jon Bentley recommended the book To Engineer Is Human by Henry Petroski. I enjoyed Jon's presentation so much, I read the book.

This book is not about software. It's primarily about civil and aeronautical engineering. But the lessons it imparts about how to learn from failure and create more reliable products apply nicely to software engineering.

The writing style was a bit formal, and some of the examples -- this book is from the 1980s -- are dated. But overall I enjoyed it, and it made me think about how to be a better software developer.

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