Date: Sun, 11 Jun 1995 14:04:11 EST From: "Rob Slade, Social Convener to the Net" Subject: "Confessions of a Used Program Salesman" by Tracz BKCOAUPS.RVW 950502 "Confessions of a Used Program Salesman", Tracz, 1995, 0-201-63369-8, U$19.50 %A Will Tracz tracz@lfs.loral.com bxcd07a@prodigy.com %C 1 Jacob Way, Reading, MA 01867-9984 %D 1995 %G 0-201-63369-8 %I Addison-Wesley %O U$19.50 800-822-6339 617-944-3700 Fax: (617) 944-7273 %P 256 %T "Confessions of a Used Program Salesman" This is a fun book about software portability. No, no! Send away those men in the white coats, and put down that butterfly net. Tracz has obviously had a lot of fun writing and speaking about the topic over the years, and he has collected a lot of that here. Some of the humour is just that (a rather sexist chapter on the history of programming languages, for example), but the similarities between "Not Invented Here" (NIH) and National Institute of Health", and between "Initial Program Load" (IPL) and "Intellectual Property Law", are used to make important points. Tracz is not unaware that software reuse most often means a radical shift in thinking and planning, right from the earliest stages of software development. Gently, he makes the points about the advantages of reusability. (He could, perhaps, have made more use of the "UNIX culture", but that might have been reaching too far for an IBMer.) And, for those who see humour as dangerously subversive, Appendix A talks about "Domain-Specific Software Architecture Engineering Process Guidelines", for forty pages. I mean, you can't say fairer than that. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1995 BKCOAUPS.RVW 950502 ====================== ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 RSlade@cyberstore.ca The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it - J. Gilmore Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" 0-387-94311-0/3-540-94311-0