Book Review.

I was just reading Gordon Weakliem's weblog and noticed that he'd gotten interested in Scheme and was reading the Little Schemer.   I've read the Little Schemer and its OK, but Sussman and Abelson's "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" has to be the best.  It was used for years at MIT as the introductory text for computing.  I've used it to teach hundreds of students in introductory computer science and programming language courses and think its the finest computer science text ever written.    The book has very sophisticated prinicipals in it and I think it gives an execellent grounding in principals as well as letting beginning students write some pretty cool programs. 

[Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

Thanks, I'll look into that. Patrick Logan posted a list of Scheme books a few months back, I see from there that the text for SICP is online for free as well. From looking at Amazon, SICP seems to produce distinct reactions from the reviewers - who would've thought a book on Scheme would attract 100+ reviews? I can't even remember why I picked The Little Schemer, probably because it was short and seemed approachable. So far, it is, though I'm still not sure of how to apply what I'm learning. I looked briefly at SICP today and I like the idea of the self-interpreter project, this sort of thing always has appealed to me.

Seen in the referrers today: searching Google for "living off ebay". Not as good as some of Brad's referrers, but more interesting than the usual.

Next time. Next time, we'll write unit tests for all our classes. [Be Blogging]

This is one thing we did right. We didn't follow through on continuous integration, and what's an issue tracking system? ;-) But the unit tests were some of the only verification tools we've had to take our system live.

If you're wondering what I'm talking about, we took a big customer live on our base web service today. There's been no press release, so I'm not naming names, but we were live today, briefly, until the network flaked out, fortunately later in the day so nobody had to be woken up. We're trying it all again tomorrow, at a more reasonable hour of the morning.

It seems like deployment is fertile ground for topics, I want to try to document some things I've learned, when I catch up on sleep

Next time, we won't defer the operations use cases to the end of the development cycle.

Next time, I will use NAnt for my builds.

Next time, I will have automated integration tests.

Next time, we'll have a server health page.

Next time, the code will publish performance counters. Lots of them.

Next time, we're using a standard logging package, and we'll be able to enable and disable logging dynamically.

Next time, I will have a fully automated, one click install.

Next time, I'm working 40 hour weeks the month leading up to deployment.

Next time, when someone wants to repave the production hardware the night before we go live, the answer's NO!

Next time, I'm going to remember this time, and not make the same mistakes. No, wait, next time, it's all going to be in Java, so I'm going to have to learn this all over again! Bah.

I'm on call tonight. Here's hoping the phone doesn't ring at 3 AM.