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New! See David Platt performing live on YouTube, here and here.
Today’s software sucks. There’s no other good way to say it.
It’s unsafe, allowing criminal programs to creep through the Internet wires
into our very bedrooms. It’s unreliable, crashing when we need it most, wiping
out hours or days of work with no way to get it back. And it’s hard to use,
requiring large amounts of head-banging to figure out the simplest operations.
It’s no secret that software sucks. You
know that from personal experience, whether you use computers for work or for
personal tasks. In this book, programming insider David Platt explains why that’s the case and, more
importantly, why it doesn’t have to
be that way. And he explains it in plain,
jargon-free English that's a joy to read, using real-world examples with which
you're already familiar. In the end, he suggests what you, as a typical user, without a technical background, can do
about this sad state of our software—how you,
as an informed consumer, don’t have to take the abuse that bad software dishes out.
As you might expect from the book’s title, Dave’s exposé is laced with humor—sometimes outrageous, but always dead on. You’ll laugh out loud as you recall incidents with your own software that made you cry. You’ll slap your thigh with the same hand that so often pounded your computer desk and wished it was a bad programmer's face. But Dave hasn't written this book just for laughs. He’s written it to give long-overdue voice to your own discovery—that software does, indeed, suck, and it shouldn't—and to make you a wiser, happier citizen of our computer-using world.