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A Discipline of Programming

by Edsger W. Dijkstra (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars 15 customer reviews
ISBN-13: 978-0132158718
ISBN-10: 013215871X
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 217 pages
  • Publisher: Prentice Hall, Inc. (October 28, 1976)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 013215871X
  • ISBN-13: 978-0132158718
  • Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 0.6 x 8.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #153,696 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 35 people found the following review helpful
computer science classic
By Ganapathy Subramaniam on September 26, 2001
Format: Paperback
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Coming from no less a person than Dijkstra, this book, though dated takes programming to a different level.
It blesses the discipline of programming with the mathematical formalism and begins to look at it as a piece of mathematics.
I picked this book while doing my CS undergraduate, and made me fall in love with CS, all over again.
It does NOT however talk much about programming techniques or methods! It looks at programs from as formal a view point as possible and builds a framework for constructing 'correct' programs..or more correctly a framework for 'proving the correctness' of a program. It takes you to the point of considering programs as poetry..
Its difficult to contemplate the application of the thoeries developed here into practice, though a lot of it is used in some form or the other, but nonetheless it makes an excellent reading.
I recommend it to anybody seriously interested in computer science .
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17 of 20 people found the following review helpful
The finest book that I own.
By A Customer on July 31, 1998
Format: Paperback
I purchased A Discipline Of Programming about fifteen years ago, at the start of my programming career. It remains the most important programming book that I own, and possibly the most important book of any kind. Anyone who aspires to be a programmer should spend many hours reading it. It is impossible not to benefit hugely.
The (unnamed) language invented by Dijkstra, almost as an aside in the early chapters of the book, is the language in which I would most like to write my programs. Some day perhaps I will be able to.
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful
A book about reasoning
By Hai Zhou on September 27, 2000
Format: Paperback
This is not only a book about programming, it is also a book about reasoning on programs, and even a book about reasoning. Treating a program as a formal object, the book discussed its meaning, how to reason about it, and even how to derive it. If you are not a hacker or do not want to be one, you will like this book, and highly possiblely you will read it many times.
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9 of 12 people found the following review helpful
How to loop.
By Michael Butterworth on August 3, 2005
Format: Paperback
This book shows by example that iterative algorithms can be derived - you don't need a lucky inspiration to discover them. If you have ever vacillated between putting something in the initialization or body of a loop; or written a loop that doesn't terminate in some cases; this will change your whole approach to coding.
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9 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Still relevant after all these years
By Amazon Customer on July 26, 2000
Format: Paperback
I still have my original copy of this book. It is one of thefew that are not in storage.
Many of the concepts (such as the chapters on arrays and verification) are still fresh. The emphasis on developing programs by stepwise refinement has guided much of my own programming...
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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful
excellent
By A Customer on December 16, 2003
Format: Paperback
This is an excellent book in reasoning about programs. It is fairly rigorous and requires a bit of math maturity, and the reader should be warned that formal methods of computer science have evolved quite a bit since 1976. By this I refer to axiomatic program verification and semantics. The key characteristic of this book is that it is built around discussing real world algorithms. This makes the practical consequences of the analysis more evident than in a typical textbook format.
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19 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Nice place to visit, wouldn't want to live there
By A Customer on July 26, 2002
Format: Paperback
I really wanted to get my hands on this book and now that i have (via interlibrary loan) i want to warn folks that this is not light reading. I found a majority of this book very boring and all but impenetrable. I like Dijkstra's English prose, but when he embarks on the math I wish he'd state the point of each set of formulae above them. It would have also helped if he stressed practical uses of his insights vis-a-vis an actual programming language. This "just shows how much I know" I'm sure, but I suspect many people will feel similarly. FYI: My background is Bachelor's in C.S. with a C.S. GPA of 3.87/4.0. A depressing indictment of U.S. education, Dijkstra would say :)
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It is a classic
By Bill Jarvis on June 21, 2014
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
I bought the book wanting to learn the guarded command language and
because I have read many EWDs. His writing is clear, the reasoning
precise.

I should have read it years ago.
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