What do you think?
Rate this book
How Software Works
A guide to the functions and operation of computer software explains how software and hardware work together, discussing operating systems, programming languages, and database, spreadsheet, word processing, graphics, communications, Windows, and utility software products. Original.
198 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1993
1 person is currently reading
38 people want to read
About the author
Ron White
45 books31 followersRon White is a two time national memory champion winning the USA Memory Championship in 2009 and 2010. He held the record for two years for the fastest time to memorize a deck of shuffled cards in only 1 minute and 27 seconds.
Note: There are several authors named "Ron White". Their books need to be properly segregated.
Note: There are several authors named "Ron White". Their books need to be properly segregated.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 28, 2012
This edition was published in 1993, so re-reading it in 2012 (19 years later) a lot of the information is out of date. For instance, it talks about expanded/extended memory in MS-DOS to get past the 1 MiB barrier, whereas people are now moving to 64-bit versions of Windows to get past the 4 GiB barrier. Still, this information was correct when the book was written, so I can't fault it for that.
I think the bigger problem is the book's lack of focus. It follows up on How Computers Work, which I liked: that book went through various items of computer hardware and gave a bit of detail on how they actually worked. This was interesting as general knowledge, and might be useful if you needed to repair a problem. However, I'm not sure who the target audience is for this book.
For instance, part 2 covers programming languages. If you're already a programmer, you won't learn anything here, and you'll probably wince at the errors. For instance, the author refers to "math strings" instead of numeric variables/values. He also treats "while ... do" and "if ... do" as 2 different types of loops, but doesn't even mention "for" loops (i.e. looping based on an incrementing counter rather than a boolean expression).
If you're not a programmer, but you'd like to learn, this book won't teach you anything that's directly useful. Even the flow-chart is inaccurate, e.g. he declares/initialises a "Location" variable but then never inspects it or updates it. If you're not interested in programming at all, this whole section is irrelevant.
I recommend Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software for a much better look at the concepts involved. It goes into a lot more detail, but that's fine because it's aimed at a more specialised audience. There might be a market for a simplified version of that, but this book ("How Software Works") doesn't fill that need.
There's also some duplication between this book and "How Computers Work", e.g. the chapter that covers communication between a modem and a computer (chapter 17 here, chapter 23 there). It would be better to assume that people have read the previous book and just refer to it here.
There are some useful ideas in here, e.g. the description of binary trees for database indexes. Unfortunately, even then it doesn't go into enough detail (e.g. the principle of rebalancing a tree/index).
I think the bigger problem is the book's lack of focus. It follows up on How Computers Work, which I liked: that book went through various items of computer hardware and gave a bit of detail on how they actually worked. This was interesting as general knowledge, and might be useful if you needed to repair a problem. However, I'm not sure who the target audience is for this book.
For instance, part 2 covers programming languages. If you're already a programmer, you won't learn anything here, and you'll probably wince at the errors. For instance, the author refers to "math strings" instead of numeric variables/values. He also treats "while ... do" and "if ... do" as 2 different types of loops, but doesn't even mention "for" loops (i.e. looping based on an incrementing counter rather than a boolean expression).
If you're not a programmer, but you'd like to learn, this book won't teach you anything that's directly useful. Even the flow-chart is inaccurate, e.g. he declares/initialises a "Location" variable but then never inspects it or updates it. If you're not interested in programming at all, this whole section is irrelevant.
I recommend Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software for a much better look at the concepts involved. It goes into a lot more detail, but that's fine because it's aimed at a more specialised audience. There might be a market for a simplified version of that, but this book ("How Software Works") doesn't fill that need.
There's also some duplication between this book and "How Computers Work", e.g. the chapter that covers communication between a modem and a computer (chapter 17 here, chapter 23 there). It would be better to assume that people have read the previous book and just refer to it here.
There are some useful ideas in here, e.g. the description of binary trees for database indexes. Unfortunately, even then it doesn't go into enough detail (e.g. the principle of rebalancing a tree/index).
Displaying 1 of 1 review