Passages

Gerald M. Weinberg's An Introduction to General Systems Thinking is this month's Passages selection. Weinberg's Psychology of Computer Programming was last month's Passages selection. I believe that many more software engineers have read last month's selection than this month's. Some of the virtues of Psychology are shared by this book: Weinberg's engaging writing style, cultural and literary fluency, clever questions for further research, intellectually exciting suggested readings, and overall combination of a bigpicture theoretical framework that is suggestive and powerful with a practical, anecdotal approach that makes it possible to get down to brass tacks. However, the two books are also very different: unsurprisingly, the Psychology is clearly a very relevant book for software engineers, about the human dimension of programming computers. An Introduction to General Systems Thinking uses computer programming, as an example of a way to go about doing general systems thinking, but it is not really a "computer" book, specifically, at all. It is what it says it is.