Facts and Errors of Professional Programming

I want to talk a little about the book that I recently read. This book is The Facts and Fallacies of Professional Programming by Robert Glass. This book may be of interest to all professionals involved in almost all stages and areas of the software life cycle - requirements collection, design, development, testing, maintenance, management (management).

The book is notable first of all because the author expresses not so much his opinion on the facts and misconceptions he cites as he summarizes his experience in the industry and the results of scientific research.
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To start the official abstract of the book:

The author, who has extensive experience in the software industry, has devoted his work to its facts, myths and misunderstandings, presenting 55 facts and 10 misconceptions related to management, life cycle, quality, research and education in the field of software development. Some of them are well known, but others are known to few. The focus is on management as the main problem of the modern software industry, the negative role of advertising campaigns that encourage people to chase mirages, and the human factor - specialists, without whom creating programs is unthinkable.

Addressed to a wide range of readers - from those who manage software projects to programmers.

For example, the fact number 2 says: " According to the results of the study of personal differences, the best programmers are up to 28 times better than the weakest. If we consider that the payment for their work is never proportionate, then the best programmer is the most profitable acquisition in the software industry . Many authors and bloggers cite this fact, different numbers of superiority over the weakest are called — and times, and even orders — but only in this book I first met specific data on this topic, and, most importantly, a link to scientific research, the result of which data was obtained about exactly 28-fold superiority. The most interesting thing is that the data on these studies were published in 1968.

Another interesting fact (this is not a separate fact, but information slipping during the discussion of one of the facts), about which, I think, is not known to many - the term “Refactoring” was invented by Fowler in 1999, but the refactoring itself existed long before , and was called "preventive maintenance."

I will give one more fact from the book: Fact 21. The increase in the complexity of the task by 25% leads to the complication of a software solution by 100%. This is not a condition that you can try to change (although the complexity is always desirable to minimize), it is a real situation.

And, lastly, one misconception: Misconception 10. People can be taught programming by showing them how to write programs. I think that this error is well known to all experienced programmers - it is impossible (well, or very difficult) to learn how to write good code, if you don’t read the code written by other, more experienced programmers.

Each fact and error is described by the author according to the same scheme:
- Formulation of fact or error
- Discussion
- controversy
- Sources
- Links

The book consists of two parts - “Facts” and “Delusions”, 7 chapters - 4 chapters of facts and 3 chapters of delusions (the full table of contents can be viewed in one of the stores by reference in the basement of the article). Each chapter (with the exception of the smallest, consisting of one fact) is further divided into sections. For example, Chapter 1, On Management, is divided into the following sections: Human Factor, Tools and Methods, Assessment, Reuse, and Complexity.

Where can I buy:
- books.ru (I ordered here, you can see the table of contents and read several pages for review)
- ozon.ru