Tech Book Face Off: Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering Vs. Programming Pearls 2

Since I've been hitting the tech books pretty hard for a while now, for this Tech Book Face Off I wanted to take a bit of a breather and do a couple of relatively easy reads. These books have been on my to-read list for some time, so I decided to finally check them out. The first one, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert L. Glass is a book in a similar vein as The Pragmatic Programmer in that it relates various tidbits of advice on the craft of software engineering. As for Programming Pearls 2 by Jon Bentley, this book surprised me. I thought it would be somewhat similar to Facts and Fallacies, just more directly related to instructive programming examples than to the software engineering field at large, but it turned out to be quite a bit different, as we'll see in this review.

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Tech Book Face Off: Don't Make Me Think Revisited Vs. The Non-Designer's Design Book

I read a lot of technical books about programming languages, development methods, and coding techniques. Those books help enhance my skills in what I do most of the time, which is embedded firmware development, and what I'm interested in, which is learning new programming languages and new ways of solving problems with software. Every once in a while I feel like I should dip my toes into the design side of the pond so I can get a better sense of how to design features that will make the stuff I build easier to use, and so I can better understand the reasons behind what makes a particular design good or bad. For this dip in the pond, I chose Don't Make Me Think Revisited by Steve Krug, a safe book considering that I've already read and loved the previous version of the book. I also picked up a book I've been meaning to read for a while: The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams, off of a reading list from Joel Spolsky's blog. These books were both quick, enjoyable reads, but let's break it down a little more.

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