New: Book Report: Code Complete

Computers are hard. This afternoon, I was trying to figure out why some people couldn't view my web site. It sounded like a DNS problem; one guy reported it was affecting him on Comcast in Boston. So I tried Googling for DNS problem reports; I found people complaining that Comcast provides crappy DNS. I don't know if that means that Comcast provides crappy DNS or if that means that Comcast has many customers and thus has more people to whine about it. And then I got sidetracked when I found out that I no longer know what organization manages san-francisco.ca.us. Back when I set up this domain, san-francisco.ca.us was managed by an outfit called Tycho.net. They were the (something something) delegate. No one outfit was going to try to handle registering all of the .us domains; depending on what region you wanted a domain in, you'd deal with some local delegate. Thus, tycho.net. Don't look them up, they no longer exist. I found a forum post which reported that tycho.net got gobbled by something which got gobbled by something else which got gobbled by sonic.net. If sonic.net still manages san-francisco.ca.us, I didn't find any evidence of it on their web site. www.nic.us seems to imply that www.nic.us manages it--but it doesn't have any record of my domain. So the good news about my domain is that it's free, but the bad news of "free" is that if no-one's cashing your checks, then maybe you don't know who you're dealing with.

Computers are hard. Anyhow, yeah, book report, yeah, Code Complete, here we go.

This is one of those influential books that I didn't get much out of because their ideas have already percolated out into society. Heck, a large part of what it does is distill down ideas that had already percolated around society long ago. This book takes the time to summarize both sides of the goto-considered-harmful debate. So I kinda spaced out most of the time I was "reading" this book. Still, there are advantages of skimming over a book that's considered an authority of sanity and stuff.

I'm thinking of this section in particular:

Taking pictures of whiteboard drawings with a digital camera and then embedding those pictures into traditional documents can be a low-effort way to get 80 percent of the benefit of saving design drawings by doing 1 percent of the work required if you use a drawing tool.

I do that. I draw on the whiteboard and snap a photo instead of diving into you favorite diagram-drawing tool. And people laugh at me when I do. But now I can point at this book. I can say, "It's in Code Complete, thus it is accepted industry practice QED."

Labels: book, photography, programming