The Timeless Way of Building

A book about buildings that is read almost exclusively by programmers, which tells you something about programmers.

The idea worth stealing is that a good structure is grown from small pieces that each make sense on their own, not drawn once from above. Twenty-three page types that all render the same kind of document is that idea: nothing here has a layout it does not derive from its own content and its own children.

Where it stops being useful

Alexander is against the specification and in favour of the sequence, which is lovely advice for a courtyard and useless for a wire protocol. Some things really do have to be written down first, exactly, once.