Book Overflow

Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups discuss Stephen Wolfram's excellent primer on ChatGPT! An incredibly dense work, they briefly summarize its key takeaways, talk about whether or ChatGPT is truly intelligent, and reflect on how their views of the current AI landscape have changed after reading this book. Enjoy!

Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups discuss "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" by Martin Fowler. Join them as they talk about the importance of automated testing when refactoring, how to play nice, and how refactoring can be justified as a business consideration!

Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups discuss "A Philosophy of Software Design" by John Ousterhout. Join them as they talk about pulling complexity downward, the importance of code clarity, and the book's subtle rebuttals to Uncle Bob's Clean Code!

In this inaugural episode of Book Overflow, Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups discuss "The Practice of Programming" by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike. Written in 1999, Carter and Nathan discuss its timeless advice around style guides, interfaces, and debugging, as well as reflecting on how the software engineering industry has changed in the 25 years since it's been written.