Having seen it mentioned on Dave Jones’ blog (), I picked up The Soul of a New Machine and read it in 3 days. I think it pairs nicely with The Mythical Man Month as a cautionary tale for would-be computer nerds. Other than the amusing and all-too-true metaphor of ‘mushroom management,’ the interesting parts for me were the computer architecture digressions, with mostly reasonable layman’s explanations of i-cache, addresses, and the like. And the extensive discussion of Adventure — I had to break out TADS and try Colossal Cave myself. Doom was still better.