Customer Reviews

Coding Slave

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is one of those books I regret I have read. I could have used that time for something more productive instead.

The book is written by an amateur author and it shows. The characters are poorly developed, lacking any resemblance of an arc. The author introduces and tosses them away quite abruptly and their existence doesn't support the narration.

Speaking of the plot, I am still at a loss. In the beginning there is some idea that seemed to be developing into something but it got thrown away at some point, followed by a chapter with completely unrelated development, making me wonder what the ado was about.

I was also unpleasantly surprised by the so-called "Appendix" featuring a rather lengthy (several dozens of pages) excerpt from Aristotle. Given that Aristotle was mentioned throughout the book exactly once (as a reference in one dialogue), including that particular excerpt (again, having no connection to the rest of the book) feels like a cheap trick to boost the book page count.

Last but not the least is the execution. The book looks and feels really cheap: flat spiral bound poor quality paper with poor printing, and thin carton covers. It actually feels more like a software manual from the early eighties. I have no idea whether this resemblance is intentional but it definitely makes this book priced at a premium.

To summarize: this book is hardly worth any of your time, especially at the given price. Montaigne's Essays book costs about two dollars less and it will make you a better person (as well as entertaining you in the process).

I work in the computer industry and I bought this book thinking it would be filled with lots of in-jokes, or just things I might recognize and find amusing. It did have a strong beginning but just a short ways into the story, the author apparently decided that sex and violence is all a story needs so he threw the plot, and any sense of believability, away. He gives us the most unreasonable and unlikely sex scenes. Point in case -- the COO of the company, the software engineer, the project manager, and the programmer are in a meeting. The programmer climbs under the desk and proceeds to .. um .. lick the software engineer's lollipop. The project manager, hoping this will all go away, keeps reading the project plan aloud; the COO has no clue what to do about this. Then we get random violence and death that has nothing to do with anything.

Without hesitation, I will say this is the worst book I have ever read.

I am employed as a software developer and have a degree in English, so I am tolerant to both extreme geek speak and a fractured, post-modern narative, but that is not enough to excuse this book.

Firstly, it isn't particularly technical, so don't be turned off by that. Is it realistic? None of my real world experience bears any resemblance to it. I have yet to run into any sex slaves who happen to code.

Secondly, the book wraps itself up so abruptly that it feels more than a little cheap. The book asks an awful lot of its reader to accept the premise that what this industry needs is to have its workers having sex at work to clear their minds or relax or whatever, but what is the payoff for the reader? Where does it take us? It takes us to some kind of coder's convention where we learn that the sex slave/coding prodigy is also a great motivational speaker. Now we just have to wait for such a mesiah or get out there and start having sex at work ...

If you ask me, this book takes you nowhere fast.

I was really excited to read this book after listening to an interview with the author on .NET Rocks, an internet radio show dedicated to application development.

The book kept my interest, however the plot was quite weak. There is a lot of material that does hit home and provides some insight into what the life and plight of an application developer is like, but the sex was definetely over the top.

For one, I did not know that we were such victims. I mean, the overall message of empowering developers to recongize that we rule the world is great and all, but I don't think that we have it all that bad. I mean, what other profession pays you pretty decent money to do what you love?

Don't get me wrong, this is a decent read, but for what I was expecting, with the overall message of changing the world through code and all, the book just falls short.

I read 300 - 400 books a year, so when I say that this book is the worst book I've read in the past few years, that's saying something. It's *literally* in the bottom 1/10th of 1 percent.

The book is very short - it's printed on small pages, with noticeable margins, and runs only a bit over 100 pages. It's padded out with a laughable table of contents, an entirely unnecessary and bloated thesaurus, and a reprint of part of an Aristotelean dialogue.

...however, given how painfully bad the writing is, I suppose I shouldn't be complaining about the brevity of the "novel", but celebrating it.

The story promises to be a expose-of-geek-life: something off in the direction of Microserfs, or The First Twenty Million is Always the Hardest, etc...but it's nothing like either of those two well-done books.

This book fails in the following areas:
* characters
* plot
* writing style
* coherence / thematic unity.

The characters are very broad, very amateurish sketches of real characters. Each has one large motivation ("the greedy one", "the web-cam girl", "the tense executive", etc.), and no subtlety or personality. The characters actions do not derive from their characters - they're just templates.

Here's the really amazing thing: these characters do not - for the most part - interact. There are a few scenes where character
A says something to character B, but there's no real communication, or give and take.

The plot is laughable as well: a Big Company starts a software project, gets in over it's head, then tries to get back on schedule by (a) firing all of it's employees, (b) bringing in H1B Indian coders, (c) hiring a $1,500/day coder who's expertise seems to lie mostly in drinking beer and going to strip clubs. This scheme works. Then, at the end, there's a big denouement that makes no sense, and seems like some 13 yr old poster to Slashdot tacked one of his posts onto the end of the novel.

The writing style is pedestrian, without having the simple cleanliness that sometimes comes with workman-like prose.

The coherence/thematic unity is entirely missing. At one point we're (apparently) supposed to agree with the author that it is a Bad Thing to hire Indian programmers. Then at another point we're supposed to admire the outside-of-the-box thinking of one female Indian programmer for having sex with two employees in a conference room while a meeting is going on. Later yet we're supposed to feel an up welling of solidarity with the poor exploited programmers and agree that the obvious solution to all of their problems is some sort of guild infrastructure. Finally, at the end, we're supposed to read an Aristotelean dialogue and feel wise, or something.

The book made so little sense to me that I spent a while reflecting on it, wondering "is he getting at something deep, and I'm just missing it?". I finally realized that, no, I'm decently read and reasonably smart, and I wasn't missing anything important: this was just an incoherent book with a few messages that the author might think are deep, but are really just garbage.

The author has a bunch of vague, incoherent ideas, and is incapable of critical thought or reflection. I've unfortunately seen this a lot: folks who are quite good technically (because of a lot of reading, thinking, and skill building) somehow get it into their heads that some other field of endeavor (e.g. writing) must be trivial, and there is no read to read up on the area, practice, or polish the initial result.

The book makes no sense. It is, in short, a steaming pile of crud.

I wish I had my $13 back, but more than that, I wish I had the hour of my life that I spent reading this garbage back.

I was incredibly disappointed by this book ... I bought it based on the reviews and was eager to read it once I received it ... the premise of the story is grossly over-simplified ... the character development is non-existant and - quite frankly - somewhat illogical ... the events make no sense and I had trouble relating a lot of them to anything else in the book ... they seemed to exist to get the story to a point where the author wanted it and not because they added to the story or support the character development ... but, most of all, the blatant sex was insulting and ridiculous ... the whole story revolves around a young indian womens propensity to sexually please those around her in order to acheive her goal of fixing software development ... this book manages to insult IT execs, indian women, stay-at-home-moms, introverted IT guys, and the reader all in one fell swoop ... avoid it like the plague!

This 144 page story is a collection of stale and uninteresting software development tales and observations glued together with a bunch of very lame sex stories. The one interesting idea, that IT workers really control things, is developed about as much as your average Slashdot posting.

I gave it two stars because I *did* finish reading it. It's a very short book, but the spiral binding allowed me to read it one-handed while holding my newborn.

If you're interested in IT project fiction, check out Tom Demarco's The Deadline instead.

I can't help but chuckle at the reviews that say "this is the worst book I've ever read," "skip it," etc. As a piece of dramatic fiction, I agree "Coding Slave" is amateurish and shoddy. But it isn't intended to be fine literature. This is a call to arms, a manifesto, a tract, thinly veiled in narrative form. The characters are so undeveloped not because the writer is bad, but because they aren't really characters. They're symbols, archetypes. Read this to ingest its message, not to thrill at its innovative structure or whatever. (Although, Reselman does throw in a few good turns of phrase, I thought.) This book is the "Fight Club" of the programming set, and Ajita Obstreperous or whatever her name is supposed to be is its Tyler Durden. I want to work on Justice!

Reading for pleasure is one of those things that I seem to do less than I'd like. One of the big reasons is that I'm a reading adrenalin junkie. I've done this to myself. For a long time, I'd read nothing but those catastrophe at sea, stranded on the top of a mountain, dying in the forest, non-fiction books. It's embarrassing, but I've gotten so that if the main character doesn't stave off starvation by eating their recently-dead best friend for lunch in the middle of the southern ocean with no hope of survival, I'm not really interested. And that's just non-fiction. If it's fiction, it's got to be even more shocking to keep me interested. If someone "made up" the story it better be about sex-crazed junkie bank robbing circus freaks, staving off starvation by eating their recently-dead best friend for lunch in the middle of the southern ocean.

Well, that being said, I tore through Coding Slave. Something about it just clicked with me. It's funny, but in a way it's very similar to these catastrophe at sea books. Only that the catastrophe is the current state of software development and we're all in the same boat.

Coding Slave describes, very accurately, what happens to us as software developers. The cast of characters is great: a decadent, over-paid jet-setting consultant, a true coder struggling to fit into the corporate coding environment, and a brilliant highly educated foreign-born female engineer willing to do anything for her clients.

Everything happens in this book. There's a murder. A suicide. A murder-suicide. Sex. Scandal. The FBI. More sex. It's just great.

But that's not the point at all. The entire book, in a way, is a stage for Reselman to tell you his vision for how to fix the current mess in our profession : broken software, budget overruns, redundant efforts, poor quality of life, lack of respect, imposters, un-equal compensation, under-compensation: the whole nine.

I'm an idealist. So's Reselman. I think It's good to be an idealist, but then again, and idealist would. So suffice it to say, I'm totally into the ideas he has for us in Coding Slave. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Coding Slave is the Walden of the modern age. Okay, maybe it's more like Skinner's Walden Two, than Thoreau's Walden. But it does propose a utopia of sorts. So the question becomes, could the utopia proposed in coding slave work?

Well, people have tried to implement Skinner's ideas from Walden Two, and they work, um sort of, but you don't see us all working four-hour days and spending the rest of our time painting. I, for one, would like to try out Reselman's ideas. Then again I'd go live in Walden Two: I'm an idealist.

Now, the book's too good to get nitpicky about style. Stylistically, Kurt Vonnegut comes to mind, a little too much at times. Perhaps this is just coincidence. But, then again I love Vonnegut. It's kinda like this book was tailor made for me.

My one big gripe is that the book literally fell apart twice on me. The binding sucks. It's slapped together with that plastic ring binding we use for code docs. Perhaps this was intentional. This was annoying because I had to stop reading to re-assemble the darn thing. Well, hopefully the next printing will be perfect bound.

So, can you tell I liked it?

-Brendan

The book was great. It painted an all-too-true picture of today's code monkeys (myself included) and their environment. However, the format, story, and outcome were not quite what I was expecting (or hoping).

I read it upon recommendation from a friend. The way he described it misled me into believing it was a story of self-empowerment (i.e. get-yourself-outta-the-coding-trenches-and-do-something-rewarding!).

Although that's not entirely the message given, it was still a great snapshot of the current industry and also describes a sample method and outcome in trying to overcome the shortcomings that we face.