Passages

摘要

Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine is by far the best book "about" software engineering that was not written by a computer scientist of any kind, and does not really describe any serious software engineering at all. Never mind these qualifiers; no other book captures the excitement, the madness, and the heart of a big software engineering project as well as Kidder's story of the development of a 1970s minicomputer, Data General's Eagle. In fact, to consider The Soul of a New Machine only as a masterpiece of computer or software engineering is to sell it short: the book is likely the best general-audience account of the high-wire act of time-pressured modern engineering ever written.