The Third Bit

Books I Want Someone to Write #23

I used to maintain a list of books that I wished someone would write, so that I could review them for Doctor Dobb’s Journal. (It even happened once, which just goes to show that sympathetic magic actually works.) Rebecca Wirfs-Brock’s latest article, “Designing for Recovery”, reminds me that the one I want most still isn’t on the shelves. I’d really, really like someone to write a book on error handling and recovery: something like 25-30% of the code in large applications is devoted to this, but no one is ever taught how to do it systematically. As distributed systems become the norm, partial failure and fault tolerance are becoming everyday issues; if anyone out there wants to be rich, famous, and popular, there are worse places to start than writing this book.