Complete Idiot's Guide to Modems and Online Services Book

A coder or designer could find this book engaging; a normal human would not. While the senior developer on my team found it interesting, I as project manager found it too "close to home." The author chronicles the history of the Sendak project and it's team of intelligent, intense players. Combined with pressure from Bill Gates, a goal of delivering on time, dependency on the SPAM project to provide core tools, and no clear requirements, the team went through months and months of leaps and tangents. The time frame is fixed but whenever everything else slipped or requirements changed at the last minute, the late delivery was blamed on the final one to carry the baton -- the developer. And yet somehow, through intensity and politics, teams scrambled and succeeded. One other point worth mentioning: the author shows snippets of C++ code as needed to illustrate points -- quite effectively.