The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

And if you are too young to remember, you might find this an interesting insight into the industry. Any road, if you are old enough to remember the mini-computer and personal computer revolutions, this book will be quite nostalgic.

So paying good money for a mediocre reading smarts.

I've heard a number of books where, after listening, I thought, 'This is what those characters sound like.' This read could almost have been done by a decent TTS system. But okay isn't what I've come to expect from audiobooks here. And barring the vocabulary problems mentioned above, he did an okay job. But many of the people have their voices described well enough that a good reader could get close enough to how they should sound. I know that it's harder when these are real people, not characters. Second, the reader really didn't do any voice characterisations. So hearing the reader get it wrong really spoils the listen. These kinds of books tend to use a lot more uncommon English words, and the listeners tend to know those words and use them, themselves. So a note to readers: If you are doing either a technical non-fiction book, or a science-fiction/fantasy book, grab a dictionary, and look up any word you don't personally know and use on a daily basis. Two in particular are 'adjutant' and 'wan.' When a reader mispronounces a word, it yanks me out of the flow, hard. For example, the reader has clearly never heard certain words pronounced correctly, and rather than looking them up, guessed, and guessed wrong. However, the audiobook performance leaves some things to be desired. So from the point of view of content, the book is a good read, whether in dead tree form, Kindle ebook, or audiobook. He definitely took the time to get the technical details simplified but correct. As a long time professional software developer myself, I must credit him for (for example) his terrific explanation of double-page faults. Kidder does an excellent job of explaining the technical issues clearly to an educated layman. While the author tries to tell the story in an unbiased way, nowhere in the book is it mentioned that Tracy Kidder was college roommate's with Tom West, which is how he came to be writing that story. Let's start with the story itself: It is definitely a bit of a hagiography to the 32-bit Eclipse team at Data General. Unfortunately, I was a little bit disappointed. So I was really excited to get it as an audiobook. In fact, it was the first Kindle book I purchased. I read this book shortly after it was published, and have re-read it every few years since.

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder