The Best of Verity Stob

Alex Moskalyuk writes "For 17 years, a British programmer who calls herself Verity Stob has been entertaining the readers of Dr. Dobbs Journal, EXE and The Register with her witty humor and variety of writing styles, which has now been collected into book form. In the foreword to the book, Danny O'Brien from NTK says that before the days of Dilbert, Futurama, User Friendly and Slashdot, the market for geek humor was dangerously under-served. So Verity attempted to add a little humor." Read on for the rest of Moskalyuk's review. The Best of Verity Stob author Verity Stob pages 316 publisher APress rating 6 reviewer Alex Moskalyuk ISBN 1590594428 summary Highlights Of Verity Stob's Famous Columns From EXE, Dr Dobb's Journal, And The Register

Stob's writing is hard to categorize. It's both humor and satire, sometimes just overwhelmingly funny and sometimes barely causing a chuckle. It's British, so some things passed way over my head. Since she started her writing back in 1998, there are references to mainframes, Unisys systems and the days when you would call tech support and instantly get a human being on the other end. Nevertheless, the book is entertaining, although it's more of a coffee table book, where you can pick it up and start on any page, than book where you'd go chapter-by-chapter.

Her humor is original and versatile. Poems, stories, scripts, hacked diaries, parodies -- the book has them all: after all, it's a collection of the best of her writing. She's an experienced C++ programmer who had been in the Windows world for a while, so frequently the jokes relate to C++ peculiarities. Such as Thirteen ways to loathe VB (written in 2000):

Calling functions and accessing arrays. In most languages you can distinguish between a call to function F with parameter 3 an a reference to an array F with index 3, because one is written F(3) and the other F[3]. In Visual Basic they're both written F(3). Yes.

Her 2001 article for DDJ is actually nothing but a screenshot of a page called Dotdotdot with the subtitle Where nerds go on and on and on and... followed by a paragraph-long article titled Microsoft does something and a bunch of upset comments from the readers including a poster spelling out Look at me! in large letters in the first post.

Or her parody of George Orwell's 1984 which talks about Way After 1984 and describes Winston Smith's typical day:

As he entered the lobby, a breeze stirred the 60-foot banner suspended high above from the roof. The three oh-so-familiar slogans of the Ministry were printed across the banner in large letters: REGISTRATION NOT LEGISLATION MONOPOLISATION IS INNOVATION WHERE DO YOU WANT TO GO TODAY?

See another sample of her writing, which those who've had to go through code reviews will especially appreciate.

The book is organized chronologically, with Verity's early writings listed first, and some of the unpublished material included at the end of the book. Overall, it's a pretty good and entertaining read, although in many cases the chapters made me scratch my head trying to get to the point of the joke. It's especially difficult with parodies, since if you don't quite know what is being parodied, it's hard to get the joke. The Register has another review and those British journalists called it painfully funny.

You can purchase The Best of Verity Stob from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Typo

[14erCleaner]

Since she started her writing back in 1998, there are references to mainframes, Unisys systems and the days when you would call tech support and instantly get a human being on the other end.

That should be 1988. By 1998 things had already gone to hell, tech-support-wise.

dotdotdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Gotta admit, the dotdotdot article does seem to ring a few bells.

Verity Stob

[Merdalors]

Verity Stob writes the funniest, wittiest stuff on programming I have ever seen. She obvioulsy knows what she's talking about.

I used to read her column regularly when if was free on Dr. Dobbs, but then they started charging for it.

I have just ordered her book from Barnes & Noble. I heartily recommend it based on her columns.

Re:You say array access, I say function invocation

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The reviewer quotes a passage where the author complains about array accesses and function invocations in VB. Now, as a former VB wonk, I hate it as much as anyone outside of the FSF, but I'm not sure I agree with this.

The author is showing either bias (real or feigned for humor value) or ignorance. Given the context (computer humor) and the medium-old-hand status of someone who has been writing it for (only) 17 years.

The original language (Fortran) used parens for both subscription and function arguments, as did most of the languages of the time.

If I recall correctly, there were no square brackets on the 026 keypunch keyboard (though there might have been an overstrike code assigned for them).

EBCDIC and ASCII had square brackets. But terminals and keypunches using them weren't widely deployed until the late '60s or early '70s.

Verity Stob at Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

You can read more on Verity Stob at Wikipedia.

Interestingly, the Slashdot parts were deemed of no value.

Re:Never heard of her.

[ipb]

"crappy mainstreamed business journals"
Started in the mid 70's and originally called "Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia" subtitled "Running Light without OverByte" it's one of the best and longest running technical computer journals out there. Here's a link to help further your education.
http://webreview.com/ddj/history.htm

A wonderful Stob article

[daviddennis]

Don't miss her interview with a bulk emailer, from The Register.

Side-splitting stuff. If the book's half as good, it's a must-read.

D

What about the Bastard Operator From Hell

[Colin E. McDonald]

http://bofh.ntk.net/Bastard.html/