Reading List for 2003

I finally finished reading Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month this past week as I was recovering from a nasty chest cold. Even though the book is now 25 years old, it’s still got some fantastic insight on why software projects are perennially late, over budget, and full of bugs.

Still on my software engineering kick, I picked up my copy of Free as in Freedom (which was included in my registration tote bag at the July 2002 O’Reilly Open Source Convention). I’m about halfway through it, and I’m even more convinced than before that RMS is considered harmful. (Apologies to Edsger Dijkstra.) I’m enjoying the book nonetheless; Sam Williams writes well, and the story is fascinating nonetheless.

So since it’s a New Year, I may as well publish my (optimistic) reading list for the upcoming twelve months:

• Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman
• Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
• Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
• The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
• The Celebration Chronicles by Andrew Ross
• The Art of Deception by Kevin Mitnick
• Effective C++ by Scott Meyers
• Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards
• Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
• Chomsky for Beginners by David Cogswell
• Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond
• A Living Tree by Rabbi Elliot Dorff and Arthur Rosett
• Generation X by Douglas Coupland
• Matters of Life and Death by Rabbi Elliot Dorff
• Broken Tablets edited by Rabbi Rachel Mikva
• The Death of Death by Rabbi Neil Gillman

Looking at that list, it seems to be mostly comprised of Computer Science, Judaism, and science fiction. Ariella says that compared to most people, I read way more non-fiction than fiction. I guess she’s right. I wonder what that says about me?