Desert Island Column

The prospect of being hanged in a fortnight, wrote Samuel Johnson, concentrates the mind wonderfully. The same, I suppose, can be said about the imminence of being stranded on a desert island with a collection of software engineering books. With a limit on the number of books one can take and the stipulation that they all be related to software engineering, the compulsive reader has to make some hard choices and engage in a fair amount of dodging and weaving to convince his editor that the books’ relationship to software engineering is not too tenuous. One has to choose one’s vestigial connections with civilization carefully. The sad fact, when forced to do this exercise, is that very few software engineering books are even worth reading let alone being cast away with. Here, though, are six that I think are.