David M. Berry (ed.): Life in Code and Software: Mediated Life in a Complex Computational Ecology (2012)

The essays in this collection, edited by David M. Berry, Senior Lecturer in Digital Media in the Department of Political and Cultural Studies at Swansea University, explore the relationship between living, code and software. For Berry, technologies of code and software increasingly make up an important part of our urban environment – indeed, their reach stretches to even quite remote areas of the world. Life in Code and Software introduces and explores the way in which code and software are becoming the conditions of possibility for human living, crucially forming a computational ecology, made up of disparate software ecologies we inhabit. As such we need to take account of this new computational environment, Berry argues, and think about how today we live in a highly mediated, code-based world – a world where computational concepts and ideas are foundational, and within which, code and software become the paradigmatic forms of knowing and doing.

Publisher Open Humanities Press, July 2012
Living Books About Life series
ISBN 9781607852834

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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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