Firefox/Reading Group

Mission

Every month (or so) we choose one book (or a set of articles/essays) to read, then get together to discuss it. Ideas for topics include programming, engineering, design, etc. Basically anything that makes us better software developers.

Communication

• Mailing list: https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-reading
• IRC: #reading on irc.mozilla.org

Discussions

Discussions will take place approximately on the last Friday of every month, although we may experiment with more frequent discussions (with less material to read!).

Current Reading

• December 2013/January 2014: TBD
• Discussion: TBD
• Discussion notes: TBD

Past Reading

• January 2013: Effective JavaScript by Dave Herman (discussion notes)
• February 2013: Unwritten Laws of Engineering (discussion notes)
• March 2013: Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project
• April/May 2013: The Art of Unix Programming by Eric S. Raymond (discussion notes)
• June/July 2013: Purely Functional Data Structures by Chris Okasaki
• August 2013: Select chapters from The Architecture of Open Source Applications, Volume I (discussion notes)
• September/October/November 2013: reading group hiatus

Ideas for Future Reading

Books:

• Psychology of Computer Programming
• Silence on the Wire: A Field Guide to Passive Reconnaissance and Indirect Attacks
• How Google Tests Software
• Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It
• Violent Python
• Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems
• Essential COM
• Joel on Software
• Dreaming in Code
• Peopleware
• Beautiful Code (collection of independent articles - would be good to choose one or two chapters at a time)
• Working Effectively with Legacy Code
• Eloquent JavaScript
• The Tangled Web: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications
• The Year Without Pants by Scott Berkun

Papers, essays, and articles:

• On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar
• Structured Programming with Go To Statements (Donald E. Knuth, 1974)
• Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System (Leslie Lamport, 1978)
• Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface (Bret Victor, 2006)
• Beautiful Concurrency (a chapter from the book Beautiful Code)

Influential writing from other disciplines:

• The Timeless Way of Building and A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
• How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand