Technical Book Club: How to Participate

Our Technical Book Club is underway with our first book Code Complete, but it’s never too late to join!  Some people have written to ask how to get involved, so I thought I’d pull together a post.

1. Buy, beg, or borrow:  Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction 2nd edition
2. Subscribe to the blog via RSS (or favorite this page):  http://feeds.feedburner.com/SpringboardFromMortarboardToOnboard using Outlook, Google Reader, or anywhere you follow feeds.  RSS provides the blog posts to you when they are posted.
3. Read along.  I’m starting at a pace of one chapter a week, although the first chapters are shorter.
4. Each Thursday I’ll post an entry summarizing some of the main points from the chapter and asking some questions.  Read over and let me know what you took out of the chapter.
5. Post comments.  I love to hear what you’re thinking as you read through.  We all have different experiences with software and different points of view.

Having trouble?  Email me and I can help

We’re just getting started, please join in you haven’t missed anything yet.  Here are the posts so far:

• Goals of the Technical Book Club
• Why should students read this book?
• Chapter 1:  Software Construction - Building Software
• Questions for Discussion
• In projects you’ve worked on how much time has been spent in the construction phase?
• Steve’s motivation for this book was to provide a quicker dissemination of best practices among practitioners and between academia and industry.  How do you learn about or share best practices to improve your skills?
• Chapter 2:  Software Metaphors
• Questions for discussion:
• What metaphors do you recall from classes or projects you’ve worked on?
• What illumination or confusion did these metaphors cause?