+100 on software tools, completely changed how I code. Wish he made a version in C because getting people to read fortran or pascal is...not easy. Tyler On Fri, Mar 21, 2025 at 8:21 AM Rich Kulawiec via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 20, 2025 at 08:52:11AM -0400, Jeffrey Brace via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
If you don't know who Brian is: He co-wrote the first C programming book, co-wrote AWK, wrote ditroff, etc. He worked at Bell labs for years.
He also co-wrote THE book about programming: Software Tools (1976; with PJ Plauger). This is one of the texts [1] that I assign as mandatory reading for students/employees/random people, because it's critically important. The software tools methodology is why we have Unix (and thus the Internet, and Linux, and lots of other things).
I've read/re-read it every year since 1978 and yet I *still* keep finding new insights in it. It's that good.
---rsk
[1] Others include Ken Thompson's Turing Award lecture, "Reflections on Trusting Trust", Richard Feynman's tour de force "Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle", published as an appendix to the report of the presidential commission on the space shuttle Challenger accident, and Marcus Ranum's "The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security".