Review: Revolution in the Valley

Jan 19, 2012 | Apple, O'Reilly

Revolution in the Valley is the story of that first Apple development team that brought the world the Macintosh and in doing so changed computing history by making the computer a personal item focused on communication rather than computation.

Popular mythology portrays the development of the original Macintosh as a somewhat religious experience. In fact, that was not really the case. As with any large scale project there are problem, conflicts, and unforeseen bugs that raise both costs and tempers. Revolution in the Valley gives the reader what a more accurate account of the not only the development culture at Apple during its early days but also how large scale projects work in the really world when real people who don’t necessarily agree on the best ways to implement feature X.

As this is not a technical training or reference, there are really no prerequisites to reading but that does not mean that more experienced developers or even designers won’t get a lot out of the book; in fact, I always find it interesting to see how those early developers of the personal computer 1980’s  solved  complex technical issues with such limited hardware and software resources; after all there was no Github or BitBucket when the Macintosh was being developed.

In short, I would recommend this to anyone who works on or will be working on larger scale software projects.

For all the Apple haters, I know that my posts have been pretty Apple-centric for the last month or so, but I do have some interesting Android and other posts plans.

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