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Readers

Bryan Cantrill

Co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer Company; creator of DTrace at Sun Microsystems and a long-time systems-software blogger.

4 books on the record · 11 Nov 2007 – 10 Feb 2019

The bar next to each date shows how long ago it was said: 6d is days, 4yr is years.

recommends it

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

Since reading it over two decades ago, I have recommended The Soul of a Machine at essentially every opportunity, believing that it is a part of computing's literary foundation – that it should be considered our Odyssey.

on bcantrill.dtrace.org · 10 Feb 2019

recommends it

Programming Rust by Jim Blandy and Jason Orendorff

not only did I buy the canonical reference (The Rust Programming Language by Steve Klabnik, Carol Nichols and community contributors), I also bought an O'Reilly book with a bit more narrative (Programming Rust by Jim Blandy and Jason Orendorff).

on bcantrill.dtrace.org · 18 Sep 2018

recommends it

The Rust Programming Language by Steve Klabnik, Carol Nichols and community contributors

If you were as I was and are contemplating diving into Rust, a couple of pieces of advice, for whatever they're worth: I would recommend getting both The Rust Programming Language and Programming Rust. They are each excellent in their own right, and different enough to merit owning both.

on bcantrill.dtrace.org · 18 Sep 2018

disliked it

Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg

And amazingly enough, if you insist on looking at the world through a bucket of shit, the world starts to look an awful lot like a bucket of shit: by the end of the book, Rosenberg has left the lay reader with the sense that we are careering towards some sort of software heat-death, after which meetings-about-meetings and stickies-on-whiteboards will prevent all future progress.

on bcantrill.dtrace.org · 11 Nov 2007

Everything Bryan Cantrill recommends — not just books — on rcmnd →

That little bar

It says how long ago something was said, so you can tell last month from 2014 without doing the arithmetic. Full and green is recent; it drains and cools as the date gets older, and empties completely at about 6 years.

A striped bar means the date itself is an estimate — the source did not carry an exact one. An entry with no date at all gets no bar.