[[!meta title="Summer Reading"]]
+Remember middle school English class, when you got a list of books to read over the summer before class? In some classes there was a list of "optional" books which you were encouraged to read if you were particularly bored over the summer or over term. This list is somewhat like the latter, except even more informal and hopefully more interesting.
+
+Additions are quite welcome.
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## Articles
* [The Kerberos play](http://web.mit.edu/Kerberos/dialogue.html): explains why Kerberos works the way it does
* [The Rise of Worse is Better](http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html): a brief description of the single coding philosophy that most influenced the design of UNIX and many related systems. The [entire article](http://web.mit.edu/geofft/Public/gabriel-on-lisp.ps), rather than just the section, is available in PostScript
* Tim Berners-Lee's [Design Issues](http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/) section, and his piece on why [Cool URIs Don't Change](http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI)
+ * [How To Ask Questions The Smart Way](http://catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html) -- 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](http://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/old-archive/gsb-archive/gsb2000-02-11.html), which you'll often find SIPB members unwisely engaging in.
* [GNU Philosophy](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html), hardline but worth reading.
* On that note, the [GPLv3](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html) and [GPLv2](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html). Dense legal style, but also worth reading once, to understand what free software is about
* [The Cathedral and the Bazaar](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/), by Eric Raymond: an overview of closed-source ("cathedral") vs. open-source ("bazaar") design and participation philosophies
* [Why Nerds are Unpopular](http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html), by Paul Graham
- * [How Athena Works](http://web.mit.edu/ghudson/info/athena), by Greg Hudson, longtime Athena engineer and SIPB member
+ * [How Athena Works](http://web.mit.edu/ghudson/info/athena), by Greg Hudson, longtime Athena engineer and SIPB member. Note that sections 5 through 11 don't really apply any more.
* [The e-mail threading algorithm](http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html), 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](http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html) against replacing the algorithm with something overengineered
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+ * [HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux](http://valerieaurora.org/howto.html), by Valerie Aurora, a Linux kernel hacker.
## Books online
* [The Law of Leaky Abstractions](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html)
* [Things You Should Never Do](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html), i.e., rewrite software from scratch
* [The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html)
- * [The Old New Thing](http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/), an engineer for MS who writes about stupid hacks in the name of backwards compatibility
+ * [The Old New Thing](http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/), by an engineer for MS who writes about stupid hacks in the name of backwards compatibility
* [Jamie Zawinski's](http://www.jwz.org/doc/) writings / rants. jwz developed Netscape 1-3, and played a role in the open sourcing of Netscape as Mozilla.
sipb-www / wiki.git / blobdiff