Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters (Barr)

Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters is subtitled “What I Learned in Ten Years As a Microsoft Programmer”. If only that were true! Instead, we get about 145 pages of what it’s like to work on MS software projects, followed by another 100+ pages of apologia for various Microsoft-related issues, including out-of-date explanations of the MS antitrust trial and other competitive issues (see for yourself at the author’s site). I really wanted to like Barr’s book, and parts of it (like the list of ancient dialects of BASIC– I remember most of those, dang it!) brought back happy memories of my own time in the early PC world. Ultimately, though, the book doesn’t live up to its billing; Barr spends almost no time talking about the actual experience of being a developer at MS (except to rant about the breaking-the-build process), which is why I wanted to read the book in the first place.
Some good did come of it: I found the Old Computer Museum and went on a nostalgia tear. Final score: not recommended, unless you can find it in a library.