I recently finished Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg. It covers the development of Chandler, an open source, cross-platform personal information manager (PIM).

A project of the Open Source Applications Foundation and led by Mitch Kapor, Chandler was meant to revolutionize desktop PIM software by eliminating the ’silos’ that separate email messages, contacts, calendar events and to-do tasks and enable peer-to-peer sharing of such information (as opposed to being proprietary and locked-in to a central server, ala MS Outlook and Exchange).

Along the way, Rosenberg delves into the bigger picture of software development by reviewing its history and thought leaders, differing ideas on organization and project management, methods of information sharing and collaboration tools, the open-source and free software movements, contemporary programming languages, modular and object oriented programming concepts, user interface design challenges, coding and quality control issues, and much more.

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