[]
Dreaming in Code
  • Published: 15 March 2008
  • ISBN: 9781400082476
  • Imprint: Crown
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 416
  • RRP: $29.99

Dreaming in Code

Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software

Formats & editions
EBook
16 Jan 2007
Paperback
15 Mar 2008
Buy from…
Book Hero BookHub Mighty Ape Paper Plus The Nile The Warehouse Whitcoulls Unity Books Find Local Retailers

Culture and technology readers (think Tracy Kidder, Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Johnson, Edward Tenner, Howard Rheingold); readers of riveting business stories (Pascal Zachary's Showstopper; Po Bronson's The Nudist on the Late Shift; Michael Wolff's Burn Rate); software professionals (roughly 2.5 million in the U.S. today); anyone who wonders why on earth it took Microsoft five years to create Vista, the latest version of Windows.

Our civilization runs on software. Yet the art of creating it continues to be a dark mystery, even to the experts. To find out why it’s so hard to bend computers to our will, Scott Rosenberg spent three years following a team of maverick software developers—led by Lotus 1-2-3 creator Mitch Kapor—designing a novel personal information manager meant to challenge market leader Microsoft Outlook. Their story takes us through a maze of abrupt
dead ends and exhilarating breakthroughs as they wrestle not only with the abstraction of code, but with the unpredictability of human behavior— especially their own.
  • Published: 15 March 2008
  • ISBN: 9781400082476
  • Imprint: Crown
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 416
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

About the author

Scott Rosenberg

Scott Rosenberg is a writer and editor who started making web pages in 1994 as an editor of the San Francisco Free Press and as a co-founder of Salon in 1995, where he was both a technology and managing editor. He began blogging in 2002, and is currently a contributor to Backchannel, Steven Levy’s technology-focused publication. His book, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters, tells the story of blogging. His follow-up, Dreaming in Code, discusses software development and its discontents.
portrait photo of Scott Rosenberg

Praise for Dreaming in Code

"Dreaming in Code is the first true successor to Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine, and is written with a combination of technical sophistication and narrative skill not seen in many years. Read it to understand what . . . software wizards actually do."
--James Fallows, The Atlantic
"Rosenberg knows his subject. . . . His scenes are vivid. . . . A fascinating look inside one software-development project." --BusinessWeek