I can’t remember where I first saw the reference to Dreaming in Code: two dozen programmers, three years, 4,732 bugs, and one quest for transcendent software by Salon.com’s Scott Rosenberg, but I ordered it from Amazon right away. How could you not order a book with a title like that? How come you didn’t open up a new tab in your browser, as soon as you saw this book-title in your browser window, and order the book from your favorite online book service? Jeez, do you expect me to read through the whole darn book and tell you what it’s all about?

Well, okay, that’s what I intend to do … and the book is now sitting on top of the partially read copy of Wikinomics that I’ve also promised to read and review for millions of drooling fans out there in the blogosphere. Fair warning, though: it’s not going to happen right away. I’ve got a day job (don’t ask) with a looming deadline and a ton of work that has to get finished before I climb on a plane and head off to Japan on January 25th to give a keynote address on death-march projects at the JaSST conference in Tokyo. I’ve just ordered a new set of Bose noise-canceling headphones for the flight, and 14 hours without the distraction of email and phone calls or chattering passengers, should be perfect for reading and reporting on this great new book.

In the meantime, if you’re desperate for a quick summary, take a look at this review of Dreaming in Code from CIO Insight.

And contemplate the quote on the opening page of the book, by the legendary Donald Knuth: “Software is hard.” That’s a little more difficult to appreciate these days than it was when I stumbled into the field in 1964, because today any idiot can “program” a spreadsheet in Excel, or create a web page with Apple’s iWeb. But it’s somewhat analogous to the statement, “Photography is hard.” Sure, even a chimpanzee can take picture with a digital camera today; but there are only a few people who can create the kind of magic that Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson could accomplish with relatively primitive equipment. And so it is with software.

Rosenberg is quick to remind us (on the “Author’s Note” page of the book) that he is “barely an elementary programmer,” and that he is not trying to teach anything to experts. Instead, he says, his book “poses a question and tells a tale. Why is good software so hard to make? Since no one seems to have a definitive answer even now, at the start of the twenty-first century, fifty years deep into the computer era, I offer, by way of exploration, the tale of the making of one piece of software — a story about a group of people setting their shoulders once more to the boulder of code and heaving it up the hill, stymied by obstacles old and new, struggling to make something useful and rich and lasting.”

Stay tuned for additional comments … or go out and buy the book yourself and draw your own conclusions.