Just heard about this book while reading through the ScmPatternsBook website. There are 60 reviews on Amazon's site, and not one of them (that I can see so far) is unfavourable. This book seems to fall into the calibre of books like CodeComplete and MythicalManMonth and DynamicsOfSoftwareDevelopment. --Wim
I did buy this book, and have finished reading it. --Wim
There's a good interview with the authors over at http://www.artima.com/intv/fixit.html.
"The researchers did a test. They took a nice car, like a Jaguar, and parked it in the South Bronx in New York. They retreated back to a duck blind, and watched to see what would happen. They left the car parked there for something like four days, and nothing happened. It wasn't touched. So they went up and broke a little window on the side, and went back to the blind. In something like four hours, the car was turned upside down, torched, and stripped—the whole works."
They go on to describe the moral of the story, which is to not let things break down to an unmaintainable state of chaos. Fix the little problems as they come up, otherwise they'll quickly degenerate into big ones that can't be fixed without rebuilding your application from scratch. --Wim
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