Summer Reading
Articles
- The Kerberos play: explains why Kerberos works the way it does
- The Rise of Worse is Better: a brief description of the single coding philosophy that most influenced the design of UNIX and many related systems. The entire article, rather than just the section, is available in PostScript
- Tim Berners-Lee's Design Issues section, and his piece on why Cool URIs Don't Change
- How To Ask Questions The Smart Way -- A document on asking questions in hacker communities in ways that will help you get answers. Many of its points apply to places like Zephyr, too.
- A definition of yak shaving, which you'll often find SIPB members unwisely engaging in.
- GNU Philosophy, hardline but worth reading.
- On that note, the GPLv3 and GPLv2. Dense legal style, but also worth reading once, to understand what free software is about
- The Cathedral and the Bazaar, by Eric Raymond: an overview of closed-source ("cathedral") vs. open-source ("bazaar") design and participation philosophies
- Why Nerds are Unpopular, by Paul Graham
- How Athena Works, by Greg Hudson, longtime Athena engineer and SIPB member
- The e-mail threading algorithm, by Jamie Zawinski (jwz), old Netscape hacker. Interesting not only for the algorithm per se, but for his description of the process leading to its development, and his lost argument with Netscape 4's engineers against replacing the algorithm with something overengineered
Books online
- Abelson and Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs: the classic textbook for the famous 6.001
- Eric Raymond, The Art of Unix Programming: also explains a lot of design
- Mark Pilgrim, Dive Into Python: "a Python book for experienced programmers"
- Eric Raymond, ed., The Jargon File: a lot of hacker terminology and lore, plus quite a few interesting articles near the beginning.
Don't forget about Safari -- O'Reilly books online, free for MIT people.
Blogs, etc.
- Joel on Software, a software developer in charge of a small company who writes well
- The Old New Thing, an engineer for MS who writes about stupid hacks in the name of backwards compatibility
- Jamie Zawinski's writings / rants. jwz developed Netscape 1-3, and played a role in the open sourcing of Netscape as Mozilla.