Amy Brown, Greg Wilson (eds.): The Architecture of Open Source Applications, Vol I-II (2012)

Architects look at thousands of buildings during their training, and study critiques of those buildings written by masters. In contrast, most software developers only ever get to know a handful of large programs well—usually programs they wrote themselves—and never study the great programs of history. As a result, they repeat one another’s mistakes rather than building on one another’s successes.

The goal of these two books is to change that. The authors of four dozen open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why. What are each program’s major components? How do they interact? And what did their builders learn during their development? In answering these questions, the contributors to these books provide unique insights into how they think.

If you are a junior developer, and want to learn how your more experienced colleagues think, these books are the place to start. If you are an intermediate or senior developer, and want to see how your peers have solved hard design problems, these books can help you too.

Published in March and May 2012
ISBN 9781257638017 (Vol I), 9781105571817 (Vol II)
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License Unported
432 and 390 pages

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Lydia Pintscher (ed.): Open Advice: FOSS: What We Wish We Had Known When We Started (2012)

Open Advice is a knowledge collection from a wide variety of Free Software projects. It answers the question what 42 prominent contributors would have liked to know when they started so you can get a head-start no matter how and where you contribute.

Free Software projects are changing the software landscape in impressive ways with dedicated users and innovative management. Each person contributes something to the movement in their own way and to their abilities and knowledge. This personal commitment and the power of collaboration over the internet is what makes Free Software great and what brought the authors of this book together.

This book is the answer to “What would you have liked to know when you started contributing?”. The authors give insights into the many different talents it takes to make a successful software project, coding of course but also design, translation, marketing and other skills. We are here to give you a head start if you are new. And if you have been contributing for a while already, we are here to give you some insight into other areas and projects.

With contributions by Georg Greve, Armijn Hemel, Evan Prodromou, Markus Kroetzsch, Felipe Ortega, Leslie Hawthorn, Kevin Ottens, Lydia Pintscher, Jeff Mitchell, Austin Appel, Thiago Macieira, Henri Bergius, Kai Blin, Ara Pulido, Andre Klapper, Jonathan Leto, Atul Jha, Rich Bowen, Anne Gentle, Shaun McCance, Runa Bhattacharjee, Guillaume Paumier, Federico Mena Quintero, Mairin Duffy Strode, Eugene Trounev, Robert Kaye, Jono Bacon, Alexandra Leisse, Jonathan Riddell, Thom May, Vincent Untz, Stuart Jarvis, Jos Poortvliet, Sally Khudairi, Noirin Plunkett, Dave Neary, Gareth J. Greenaway, Selena Deckelmann, Till Adam, Frank Karlitschek, Carlo Daffara, Dr. Till Jaeger, Shane Couglan

Published in 2012
ISBN 978-1-105-51493-7
Creative Commons BY-SA License
310 pages

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Markus Krajewski: Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 (2002/2011)

Today on almost every desk in every office sits a computer. Eighty years ago, desktops were equipped with a nonelectronic data processing machine: a card file. In Paper Machines, Markus Krajewski traces the evolution of this proto-computer of rearrangeable parts (file cards) that became ubiquitous in offices between the world wars.

The story begins with Konrad Gessner, a sixteenth-century Swiss polymath who described a new method of processing data: to cut up a sheet of handwritten notes into slips of paper, with one fact or topic per slip, and arrange as desired. In the late eighteenth century, the card catalog became the librarian’s answer to the threat of information overload. Then, at the turn of the twentieth century, business adopted the technology of the card catalog as a bookkeeping tool. Krajewski explores this conceptual development and casts the card file as a “universal paper machine” that accomplishes the basic operations of Turing’s universal discrete machine: storing, processing, and transferring data. In telling his story, Krajewski takes the reader on a number of illuminating detours, telling us, for example, that the card catalog and the numbered street address emerged at the same time in the same city (Vienna), and that Harvard University’s home-grown cataloging system grew out of a librarian’s laziness; and that Melvil Dewey (originator of the Dewey Decimal System) helped bring about the technology transfer of card files to business.

The book is an extended and updated version of the original ZettelWirtschaft published in German by Kulturverlag Kadmos Berlin, 2002
Translated by Peter Krapp
Publisher MIT Press, 2011
History and Foundations of Information Science series
ISBN 0262015897, 9780262015899
215 pages

review (Tom Wilson, Information Research)
review (Tomáš Dvořák, Teorie vědy, in Czech)

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