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.

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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.

Re:Futurama is NOT geek humour

[brilinux]

I think that Futurama is a hell of a lot funnier if you are a geek than not. I cracked up when I saw "Bender's Computerized Dating Service: Discrete and Discreet", but everyone else thought nothing of it. There are several more examples like that; it is full of geek humour.

The youth of today ...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't understand Ms Stob's jokes, laugh anway and pretend that you do. Failure to do so will show your PFY status.

That VB dissection...

[fm6]

...is an absolute classic. So much so that Doctor Dobbs continues to get complaints about it from VB lovers who find it online.

BOFH

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the bastard operator from hell? That was classic geek humour, and a good role model.

Re:Never heard of her.

[jericho4.0]

If you've never heard of Dr. Dobbs Journal, you know a lot less about computer programming than you think you do.

Re:Never heard of her.

[GeckoX]

You're openly admitting that you've been in the industry for 18 years, and have never read Dr. Dobbs Journal? (Nor apparently have any clue as to what it is)

I can see that if you just entered the industry this millenium, but to be old school and not know about this publication is bordering on sacraligeous. One of the best technical programming journals there is.

Re:Wait...

[Insipid Trunculance]

You are an obvious troll but hey i will take the bait.

Before they invented High Level Languages , the testosterone filled chest thumpers designed just the algorithms. Most of the programming was done by, you know , girls. Because the men couldnt fathom Machine instructions.

And ummm,what price Admiral Grace Hooper and Lady Ada Lovelace?

Re:You say array access, I say function invocation

[operagost]

Is there a BASIC that doesn't work this way? I can't blame it on VB when CBM BASIC, GWBASIC, QuickBASIC, VAX/DEC/HP BASIC for VMS, and TI BASIC all do the same.

Re:Futurama is NOT geek humour

[Urchlay]

I think that Futurama is a hell of a lot funnier if you are a geek than not.

You have to be an old geek to get some of the jokes, like the time Bender shines the X-ray flashlight as his head and you can see a giant chip in his brain labelled `6502'. That cracked me up.. but would be about meaningless to anyone under 25 (or maybe 30, these days).

I cracked up when I saw "Bender's Computerized Dating Service: Discrete and Discreet"

You weren't the only one.

Whoever says Futurama isn't geek humor isn't paying attention...

I also like the Star Trek parodies:

"Is there anything to eat on this planet?"

"Well, it's a class M planet, so it should at least have Roddenberrys."

Even if you hate Star Trek, you gotta admit it makes great parody material.

Re:You don't have a girlfriend.

[vsprintf]

A chick can code? WOW! She must be THE BEST CODER IN THE WORLD THEN!

Aww, grow up, Junior. It's no secret that most coders are male, but the female coders I've worked with are every bit as good as their male counterparts, and in some cases better -- they have to be in order to be taken seriously by boneheads like you and not get burned out.

One that has really impressed me has a great knack for for identifying flaws during design and code reviews. She then defuses the inevitable heated defense from the male programmer with a calm, "Well, maybe you're right." A week later, the male programmer will suddenly discover a new approach that removes the flaw, and it's his idea. She never says, "I told you so," either. She does her best to get a solid final product without any grandstanding -- a real professional. If only the same could be said for the young males in the department.