Software Engineering discussion

While this chapter provides a nice overview of the tool landscape, it doesn't address the huge issue for me, which is the tool learning curve. I don't write enough code, and consistently in the same language/environment, to justify really digging in and learning most of the deep features in a full-blown development environment tool like Eclipse or Xcode. A lot of the code I write is still done using vi!

I agree with the "our programming tool will generate your code, so you don't need programmers anymore" commentary. Programmers will be here to stay for a very, very long time.

I wish that this book (in this chapter or the one on version control) would expand on the different versioning tool operation and process philosophies (such as Subversion vs. Git).

Eventhough it makes sense, I was suprised to see libraries and other open source items in this chapter under the "build vs buy" section. Then I realized all of the tools in this chapter could be under the "build vs buy" category.

As you mentioned, the buy option comes with a learning curve.

I wish author included a list of recommendations for each type of tools both commercial and open source. Nevertheless , this chapter provides with different tool types that I've never used before and really want to try. After I read Code Tuning chapter, I found a few profilers. AMD Codeanalyst profiler after installation easily integrated in Visual Studio 2010, I was impressed with level of details it provided. The other one, Very Sleepy, ran as standalone application, a little simpler, but still very nice. I hope to find other useful tools listed in Debugging and Testing sections in this chapter.

Git vs Subversion. Some time ago the following presentation forced me to try git:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKH...