You might have noticed, still no book. Sorry about that. It got shelved early in 2014 for a number of reasons. A bit of running out of steam after a year of writing for the magazine, a bit of “creative differences”, wanting to spend more time with my family, a bit of wanting to move onto new things and my general aversion of going over old ground.
However, serious respect to the people who do finish their books. It’s a lot of work, much more than knocking out a few articles. It was something of a culture shock for me (-:
Remember though – the whole message of the book would have been the same as the articles: it’s all about data. Not about classes or objects or processes, just data.
Capture the data structures in the problem domain, and think about transformations on them. Certainly don’t try to cram it into some awkward metaphor. Maybe use languages which offer cool tools for working with richly-structured data, like some of the newer functional languages.
So, the book was mainly going to say what was in the articles, just at a more gentle and thorough pace.
Some useful material did get written though – maybe about 1/2 of it. I really should get round to releasing bits of it soon.
Until next time!
free-variable.org 