Customer Reviews

Zen of Code Optimization: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Software That Pushes PCs to the Limit

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Excellent book. He's starts off each chapter with a weird story. Very easy to understand and covers all aspects of optimization on all x86 processors up to pentium. He shows you programs in C then optimizes the hell out of them in later chapters.

You can still learn a lot on optimization but there is almost nothing on the Pentium generation. Covers mostly 16 bit assembly.
Would be nice to have a book like that for 32 bit optimization.

It's rare that an author can take an esoteric topic like instruction cycle optimization and accomplish three key goals: explain the concepts with great clarity, make the book fun to read, and change the way the reader thinks about programming and optimization in general. Abrash has that rare combination of excellent communication skills, breadth and depth of technical knowledge, and a passion for helping you understand the hows, whys, and whens of code optimization. While some of the material seems a little dated now (covering Pentium I and prior CPUs), the concepts, methodologies, and ways of thinking about optimization still apply today.