Tidy First?

Appendix. Annotated Reading List and References

Alexander, Christopher. Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964.

• The book that introduced patterns. The basic idea is that each design decision resolves some of the conflicting constraints and creates (one hopes smaller) constraints to be resolved by future decisions. These configurations of constraints repeat, hence the word “pattern.”

---. The Timeless Way of Building. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

• I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It starts by re-imagining the relationship between designers and those designed for. Who should have the power to do what? It then applies patterns and novel construction techniques to defer most design decisions far beyond what would seem sensible (is this sounding familiar yet?).

Ball, Philip. Branches: Nature’s Patterns. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

---. Flow: Nature’s Patterns. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

---. Shapes: Nature’s Patterns. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

• As designers of an intellectual artifact, we tend to believe that we can design whatever we want however we want to design it. Nope. Our work is subject to natural laws (more about this in the next Empirical Software Design book). This trilogy is a cabinet of curiosities from design in the natural world.

Beck, Kent. Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns. New York: Pearson Education, 1997.

---. Implementation Patterns. Upper Saddle River: Addison-Wesley, ...