Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think

Greg Wilson, Andy Oram

"O'Reilly Media, Inc.", Jun 26, 2007 - Computers - 620 pages

How do the experts solve difficult problems in software development? In this unique and insightful book, leading computer scientists offer case studies that reveal how they found unusual, carefully designed solutions to high-profile projects. You will be able to look over the shoulder of major coding and design experts to see problems through their eyes.

This is not simply another design patterns book, or another software engineering treatise on the right and wrong way to do things. The authors think aloud as they work through their project's architecture, the tradeoffs made in its construction, and when it was important to break rules.
This book contains 33 chapters contributed by Brian Kernighan, KarlFogel, Jon Bentley, Tim Bray, Elliotte Rusty Harold, Michael Feathers,Alberto Savoia, Charles Petzold, Douglas Crockford, Henry S. Warren,Jr., Ashish Gulhati, Lincoln Stein, Jim Kent, Jack Dongarra and PiotrLuszczek, Adam Kolawa, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Diomidis Spinellis, AndrewKuchling, Travis E. Oliphant, Ronald Mak, Rogerio Atem de Carvalho andRafael Monnerat, Bryan Cantrill, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, SimonPeyton Jones, Kent Dybvig, William Otte and Douglas C. Schmidt, AndrewPatzer, Andreas Zeller, Yukihiro Matsumoto, Arun Mehta, TV Raman,Laura Wingerd and Christopher Seiwald, and Brian Hayes.
Beautiful Code is an opportunity for master coders to tell their story. All author royalties will be donated to Amnesty International.

Contents

• A Regular Expression Matcher: 1
• Interface As Ontology: 11
• The Most Beautiful Code I Never Wrote: 29
• Finding Things: 41
• Lessons from Designing XML Verifiers: 59
• Beauty Through Fragility: 75
• Beautiful Tests: 85
• OntheFly Code Generation for Image Processing: 105
• Top Down Operator Precedence: 129
• The Quest for an Accelerated Population Count: 147
• The Technology Of Freedom: 161
• Growing Beautiful Code in BioPerl: 187
• The Design of the Gene Sorter: 217
• The Case of Gaussian Elimination: 229
• The LongTerm Benefits of Beautiful Design: 253
• The Benefits of Working Together: 267
• Another Level of Indirection: 279
• Being All Things to All People: 293
• Multidimensional Iterators in NumPy: 303
• A Highly Reliable Enterprise System for NASAs Mars Rover Mission: 319
• Designing for Maximum Adaptability: 339
• A Spoonful of Sewage: 353
• Distributed Programming with MapReduce: 371
• Beautiful Concurrency: 385
• The syntaxcase Expander: 407
• An ObjectOriented Framework for Networked Software: 429
• Integrating Business Partners the RESTful Way: 451
• Beautiful Debugging: 463
• Treating Code As an Essay: 477
• When a Button Is All That Connects You to the World: 483
• The Complete Audio Desktop: 503
• Code in Motion: 527
• Writing Programs for The Book: 539
• Afterword: 553
• Contributors: 555
• Index: 565

Bibliographic information

• Title: Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think; Theory in Practice (O'Reilly)
• Authors: Greg Wilson, Andy Oram
• Publisher: "O'Reilly Media, Inc.", 2007
• ISBN: 0596554672, 9780596554675
• Length: 620 pages
• Subjects: Computers / Languages / General; Computers / Programming / General; Computers / Software Development & Engineering / General