Glasgow Book Club – July Results
15 May, 2011 2 Comments
At the request of the attendees of the last book club meeting we’ve used AV (the Alternative Vote) as a mechanism for the votes. The results are as follows:
Round 1
| Book | Votes |
| "Mythical Man Month and other Essays" by Fred Brooks | 2 |
| "Agile Estimating and Planning" by Mike Cohn | 1 |
| "Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction" by Steve McConnell | 1 |
| "About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design" by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, and David Cronin | 1 |
| "Refactoring" Martin Fowler | 1 |
| "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" by Martin Fowler | 0 |
| "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael Feathers | 3 |
50% of votes are needed to win, or all the competition needs to be eliminated. Since no book reached the required 5 votes. The lowest scoring book ("Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" by Martin Fowler) is eliminated and its second preference is used. Since the lowest scoring book got zero votes there is nothing to reattribute. So, the next lowest books (joint 1 vote each) are used instead.
Round 2
| Book | Previous Votes | Alt Votes |
Total |
| "Mythical Man Month and other Essays" by Fred Brooks | 2 | 1 | 3 |
| "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael Feathers | 3 | 2 | 5 |
| "Agile Estimating and Planning" by Mike Cohn | 1 | X | X |
| "Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction" by Steve McConnell | 1 | X | X |
| "About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design" by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, and David Cronin | 1 | X | X |
| "Refactoring" Martin Fowler | 1 | X | X |
| "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" by Martin Fowler | 0 | X | X |
In this round only two books were left remaining. 3 votes were redistributed, 1 vote was discarded as no alternative was given that hadn’t already been eliminated.
Final Result
"Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael Feathers wins with 55% of the votes.
You can buy it from Amazon:
The book club meeting will be in Waxy O’Connor’s on 19th July 2011. You can register here.
Would be interested in hearing what people think of the chosen book - the one negative criticism on Amazon.co.uk was that the book was not really about working with legacy code but more of Robert Martins “refactoring” series.
I’d been recommended it but wasn’t sure if it dealt with real legacy code (such as QBASIC, FORTRAN, etc) so held off getting it (this is because of having cobverted a few hundred lines of 1980’s QBASIC calculations into C# a while back!) so would be interested in a book that covers this area.
As I recall, it only discusses at a high level what you can do with legacy code and how to get it to work with current code. It doesn’t deal with any specific language or how to convert from one specific language to another. However, it does give pointers and guides of how convert in general, whether it is a good idea or not, and if not, how do you access the functionality.