Adventures in Code: The Story of the Irish Software Industry John Sterne
Adventures in Code tells the story of the software industry in Ireland through the experiences of its key figures. It explains how a small country with no apparent aptitude for applications development produced hundreds of small exporting companies and broke through the barriers to selling non-American products in the US. Its central thesis is that Ireland's success in software development came from the bottom up, the result of a long learning process that included lessons from the near-total collapse of the industry in the late 1980s. Companies learned from each other and the book profiles those that became the role models in middleware, e-learning, financial applications, and communications software. The book concludes with a look at the state of the Irish software industry today and considers its prospects in a fast-changing world.