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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

This book is a unique and essential reference that focuses upon the reading and comprehension of existing software code. While code reading is an important task faced by the vast majority of students, it has been virtually ignored as a discipline by existing references. The book fills this need with a practical presentation of all important code concepts, form, structure, and syntax that a student is likely to encounter. The concepts are supported by examples taken from real-world open source software projects. The focus upon reading code (rather than developing and implementing programs from scratch) provides for a vastly increased breadth of coverage.

From the Back Cover

If you are a programmer, you need this book.

You've got a day to add a new feature in a 34,000-line program: Where do you start? Page 333
How can you understand and simplify an inscrutable piece of code? Page 39
Where do you start when disentangling a complicated build process? Page 167
How do you comprehend code that appears to be doing five things in parallel? Page 132

You may read code because you have to--to fix it, inspect it, or improve it. You may read code the way an engineer examines a machine--to discover what makes it tick. Or you may read code because you are scavenging--looking for material to reuse.

Code-reading requires its own set of skills, and the ability to determine which technique you use when is crucial. In this indispensable book, Diomidis Spinellis uses more than 600 real-world examples to show you how to identify good (and bad) code: how to read it, what to look for, and how to use this knowledge to improve your own code.

Fact: If you make a habit of reading good code, you will write better code yourself.

0201799405B02032003

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Product Details

Paperback: 528 pages
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional (June 6, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0201799405
ISBN-13: 978-0201799408
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.3 x 1.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (18 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #343,331 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
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#5 in Books > Computers & Internet > Programming > Software Design, Testing & Engineering > Coding Theory

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	70% buy the item featured on this page: Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective (v. 1) 3.8 out of 5 stars (18) $52.29
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Customer Reviews

18 Reviews

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
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3.8 out of 5 stars (18 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Cool concept, but disappointing, March 9, 2004

By	Steve R. Hollasch (Redmond, WA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I purchased the book to help me out with the recurring task of quickly understanding the nature of unfamiliar large software projects. Kudos to Mr. Spinellis for tackling this subject, which is a large part of the everyday work of programming.

Unfortunately, I feel that this book was of very limited use to me as an experienced programmer, and suffers from a rather basic flaw (as a topic). The problem is that the art of code reading is really the intersection of a deep and/or broad understanding of programming, in conjunction with a deep and/or broad understanding of the tools and practices employed. One could well assert that this book is about *debugging* unfamiliar codebases as much as it is about *reading* them, since code comprehension is a component of code debugging. This is a rather apt analogy, since many have attempted to describe the black art of debugging just as Mr. Spinellis has attempted with reading, and with no definitive "must-have" coverage to date.

The result is that I felt the book rushed through important programming concepts that were either extremely basic (global variables, while loops, conditionals, blocks), or language-specific (C typedef, arrays, function pointers), or too deep for the book to address adequately (trees, stacks, queues, hashes, graphs). With regard to the latter, I found it odd to be reading a lot of text about basic data structures, when it seemed to me that I should be assumed to already have this knowledge if I wanted to read code that used it. And if I did NOT know about basic data structures, I should be reading a book about data structures rather than a book about code reading. Software patterns are also presented (though not by the name, I think). If I was to encounter a codebase that employed some programming concept I didn't understand fully (for example, red-black trees), then I would first go to a book on data structures -- not a book on code reading.

Following the sections on what I would consider mandatory prerequisite understanding are some brief chapters software engineering concepts (version control, build systems, project organization, packaging, system structures), which might be useful to a reader who had never worked on a large-scale project before.

After all of the coverage of what I would consider prerequisite knowledge, the penultimate chapter finally gets to the topic of tools and techniques for actually reading code. This chapter is in fact what I had hoped Mr. Spinellis would devote the book to. Unfortunately, most of the tools and techniques presented are very basic and quickly encountered by any programmer: regular expressions, the fact that many editors include browsing support, the grep utility, differencing tools, the idea that you could write your own tools, using the compiler to emit warnings and preprocessed code, that beautifiers exist, profiling and annotating printouts. And that's it, in about forty pages, followed by a chapter devoted to an example session.

On the whole, I think this book comes up short. If you have a few years of programming experience under your belt, then you've already encountered the basic tools and techniques presented. If someone resorted to this book to learn about a basic programming construct, then they could read my code, but I'd be nervous about letting them modify it, until they read more focused texts.

I'm rating this book at three stars because there are some good pieces here and the effort was laudable. In the end, though, I really don't think that anybody needs this book on their shelf.

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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reading other people's code can teach you a lot, July 21, 2003

By A Customer

Those wishing to understand the various styles of programming and meta-programming that have become common in open source code, as well as those who seek to broaden (if not deepen) their understanding of software engineering, would be smart to pick this up. Not only will this book help you to understand the innards of your favorite or least favorite software, but it provides insight into why the creators made the choices they did. It's not going to teach you about computer science as well as a good textbook will, but it will give you an understanding of and appreciation for what programmers balance in their minds as they shape their complex creations. Think of it as The Story and its Writer (ISBN 0312397291) applied to software.

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57 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Unfocused, June 23, 2003

By	Thomas Paul (Plainview, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Programmers need to be able to look at code and analyze what it does in order to change it or fix it. The concept behind this book is to use many of the open source code samples to discuss how to read code and how to spot potential trouble areas in code. Unfortunately the book doesn't stay focused on this single goal and that detracts from its overall value. The book spends too much time explaining the basics of programming instead of concentrating on reading code. It also bounces around from one language to another, from C to C++ to Perl to Java, which is very confusing. For example, if you are a Java programmer do you really care how the C compiler optimizes strcmp calls? And what does that have to do with reading code?

Some of the advice is fairly basic such as try to realign indentations properly and replace complex code structures with simple placeholders when doing analysis. Although there are parts of the book that are excellent, too many of these good parts are wrapped under what should be basic concepts to anyone reading code. How can you debug a Java program, for example, if you are unfamiliar with abstract classes, libraries, or polymorphism? Do you really need a book on code reading to explain basic object oriented programming?

Overall, the book seems very unfocused and I really can't recommend it.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars Rambling dissapointment
The book rambles on with no seeming focus. It does contain some interesting thoughts but to get to them you must wade through a terrible book.

Published on July 17, 2007 by R. Bedford

3.0 out of 5 stars Read your code
I gave up reading after only 20% of this book. I had hoped it would give encouragement and easy-to-read pointers on how to quickly familiarize oneself with a large body of code... Read more

Published on October 24, 2006 by T. Harris

4.0 out of 5 stars Works best if you have the matching skill sets of the material...
If you're a programmer, you are going to be reading the code that others write. It's as simple as that. But reading code is not like reading someone's novel or article. Read more

Published on August 10, 2006 by Thomas Duff

4.0 out of 5 stars Five stars for beginners, much less for seasoned programmers
While I have absolutely no doubt that the contents of this book are extremely valuable to developers, it is difficult for me to believe that seasoned programmers would need to... Read more

Published on April 28, 2006 by Charles Ashbacher

3.0 out of 5 stars An attempt at being software engineering encyclopedia that falls short
I agree with the two previous reviewers (Paul and Hollasch). On the positive side, the author's obviously a serious scholar. Read more

Published on October 17, 2005 by alkmaar

4.0 out of 5 stars Learn the other half of coding.
I run a small programming contest over the Internet (Ruby Quiz), so the author of Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective and I share a passion. Read more

Published on March 16, 2005 by James Edward Gray II

5.0 out of 5 stars Valuable resource of Information and good practices
A valuable resource for best practices, do's and don'ts, what works and why, what you should do in various situations of project, code, and architecture evaluation, and everything... Read more

Published on January 21, 2004 by ART SEDIGHI

5.0 out of 5 stars Easy to read, worth checking out for some
I stumbled upon this book when I was at the book store and picked it up without ever reading a review or seeing any kind of Internet press about it and was very surprised at what... Read more

Published on November 30, 2003 by An Pham

4.0 out of 5 stars great insights from practical experience
i like this book a lot. by touring various pieces of source code (focusing on NetBSD, an open source version of BSD), we get to see what's happening and why. Read more

Published on November 16, 2003 by jose_monkey_org

4.0 out of 5 stars Very good handling of an extremely tough subject
Why do people approach the same problem in many ways?

There is no ONE answer to it. The Code Reading is not an easy subject by any means. Read more

Published on November 4, 2003 by cltss

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