Glasgow Book Club – July Results

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.

Discovering Startling Things from Your Version Control System

BCS Event: Monday 11th April, 6:30 pm.

Speaker: Michael Feathers, Chief Scientist at Obtiva Corporation.

University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9ABmap (click on Informatics Forum in the list of buildings).

Synopsis

The industry is awash in an epidemic of bad code. We all know what bad code looks like – it’s opaque and impenetrable. But, we spend little time trying to figure out how it got that way. We assume it’s tight schedules or lack of discipline, but perhaps there’s more.

In this talk, Michael Feathers will relate several things that he’s learned by taking a longitudinal view of a system – by issuing queries of a code base and relating the results back to events on a team. The more we know about how we behave as teams in our code, the more likely we are to be able to control our development well enough to hold bad code at bay.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.