The most challenging part of the book for me personally is your call for more rigorous design, testing, and documentation. Like most developers (I'm guessing most), I find it more fun to just jump in and code. I'd be better served both at Cargill and in my independent pursuits by a more structured approach. I'll probably purchase another copy for work - I spent some time pitching it to a team member today.

12/30/98 My response:

You're absolutely right. It takes a lot of discipline to prepare properly before coding. Because mistakes early have such a huge impact, however, it is worth almost any effort to prevent them. This is most important in big projects and I confess I do not always practice what I preach in small projects. For example, the HowTo's on my Web site. Or even a lot of programs in my books. They are intended to get readers started and too much error handling hides the key concepts.