Book Review: ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever
Rework is by 37signals who are the developers of collaboration software Basecamp and is about how they approach their work and run their company.
I came across the book are looking at ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) and reading ‘Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It’ and was looking for more resources on alternative working conditions.
Despite being 288 pages long, I managed to finish the book over a couple of evenings as it was compelling and refreshing to read about a successful company that operates in an employee centred way rather then shareholder orientated which is what I experienced throughout my professional life.
The book is ultimately a set of guidelines that they have operated under and why the current corporate world model of working is outdated. One of my favourite chapters was ‘Planning is guessing’ as it rang true to how I felt about long term planning.
It is extremely difficult to plan that far ahead accurately yet managers will always try and set a specific date down in stone and be surprised when we don’t make it.
The book is full of concise anecdotes like these (including ‘Start at the epicentre’, ‘Send people home at 5’ and ‘Scratch your won itch’) and while it might not be possible to convince the company you work at to change, there are certainly some sections that you can apply to your own personal work ethic.
ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
Book review: Game Coding Complete, Third Edition
One of my personal favourite intermediate programming books, if only for the ‘Tales from the pixel mines’ that are dotted throughout the book which are the author’s first hand experiences from developing games professionally. Some of which a very entertaining and gives an insight on how some features were in done in the real world.
There are also other highlighted tidbits for ‘Best practise’ and ‘Gotcha!’ that helps break up the pages of text to make the very large book easy to digest. It covers a huge range of topics relating to using C++ in games developing which includes memory management, smart pointers, resource handling, 3D math and programming style which are explained in a matter that is straightforward, understandable and if need be, are accompanied by clear diagrams.
The last few chapters of the book cover areas of software development for scheduling and testing which are a nice addition that sets it apart from other programming books and shows that development is not just about code.
Unfortunately, it focuses heavily on using DirectX which means a lot of the sample code is not directly applicable if you are using OpenGL or developing on Linux or Mac. However, all the principles still apply regardless of API and the book is well worth getting for any programmer that is past the beginner stage and starting large projects.
Game Coding Complete, Third Edition by Mike McShaffry
