Our civilization runs on software. Far more than most people understand, it has seeped into every cranny of our lives. It is in our kitchen gadgets and cars, toys and buildings. Our national defense, our businesses and banks, our elections and our news media, our movies and our transportation networks — the stuff of our daily existence hangs from fragile threads of computer code.

And we pay for that fragility. The FBI, the FAA, the IRS — each has crashed on the rocks as it has tried to build new software systems. The private sector doesn't do much better. Software errors cost the U.S. economy about $59.5 billion annually, according to one study. Never in history have we depended so completely on a product that so few know how to make well. We can't guarantee that we will produce it on time or on budget. We can't guarantee that it will work reliably. We can't even guarantee that it will do what we want it to do. Yet we can't give it up, either: The software that frustrates and hogties us also enthralls us with promises of more, faster, better ways to work and live.

Why can't we build computer programs the way we build bridges? Is this work art or science? Why is the meeting of human mind and machine logic so treacherous? DREAMING IN CODE seeks to answer these questions. Combining fly-on-the-wall reporting, research, and in-depth explanatory journalism, DREAMING IN CODE tells the hidden story of the making of software, its frustrations and intoxications.

This is a story about a group of men and women setting their shoulders once more to the boulder of code and heaving it up the hill, struggling to make something useful and rich and lasting. Chandler, the project the book follows, is a personal information manager that will be free, will run on all platforms, and will challenge the dominant but woefully inadequate Microsoft Outlook with elegant innovations. It's an open-source project, which means the work and the code is all public, on the Internet, for anyone to study or contribute to. Yet the challenges it faces are the same ones that Microsoft's legions of programmers face as they try to crank out the latest version of Windows, or that your everyday teenage geek faces as he tries to build something cool for his website. Programming, it turns out, is as much like making a movie as it is like building a bridge. There's math and algorithms involved, but there's also collaboration and motivation, serendipity and calamity. There's wrestling with the abstraction of code and there's wrestling with the quirks of human beings — those making the program as well as those who will ultimately use it.

Nearly a quarter century ago, Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine introduced thousands of readers to the arcane universe of the technology industry. Today we live in the gleaming new world Kidder's subjects helped create and we want to know why it's still such a mess. By asking "Why is making good software so hard?" and chronicling some dreams of making it better, DREAMING IN CODE offers a window into both the information age and ourselves.