Relatively little is known about how to organize/manage software projects so that they come to a successful, on-time resolution that lasts the test of experience. This is the field of software engineering, and over the last two decades, Google has mastered this art. They share their hard-wrought wisdom in this book.
Many developers, like me, wish they could undertake several internships at leading companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, or Facebook. They could learn the tricks of the trade from what made these entities so successful. Concerning Google, software developers now can just consult this book. It provides an in-depth look into the state of the art at this engineering company. Each chapter is written by company experts and covers 25 timely topics ranging from code testing to dependency management, from continual integration to cloud services.
Google is one of only a few companies that have broached these issues in depth ever. They do not claim that their answers will solve all problems for all time. Rather, they encourage readers to learn from their well-reasoned thoughts and understand their own problems in that light. This book is relevant to the start-up as well as the corporate developer. For us computer programmers, this book is fodder and inspiration for continually producing better software.
I find the quality of writing particularly fresh. Instead of hiding behind older and well-established verbiage, they provide newly thought-out terminology in newly explained reasonings. For a technical book, this work is extremely engaging. The reader rarely if ever gets the sense that the authors are merely regurgitating rehashed theory.
This book is particularly relevant to software developers and managers of software efforts. It gives a lingua franca to the software development effort and provides abstracted concepts that will help companies move development forward. All the way to the end, I stayed engaged, and I predict many others will, too. Kudos to Google for giving back to the industry in this way!
Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time
Edited by Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum Wright
Copyright (c) 2020
O’Reilly
ISBN13 9781492082798
Page Count: 571
Genre: Computer Science
www.amazon.com