Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly)) 1st Edition

by Andy Oram (Editor), Greg Wilson (Editor)

52 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0596510046

ISBN-10: 0596510047

Why is ISBN important?

Have one to sell? Sell on Amazon

Added to

Unable to add item to List. Please try again.

Share <Embed>

Try the eTextbook free for 7 days on your Fire, iOS, Android, PC, or Mac once you have installed the

eBook features:

Highlight, take notes, and search in the book

Due Date: Dec 17, 2018 Rental Details

FREE return shipping at the end of the semester.
Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with rentals.

In Stock. Rented from Amazon Warehouse , Fulfilled by Amazon

List Price: $44.99 Save: $27.78 (62%)

Free Shipping

Deliver to

Add to Rental Cart

Condition: Used - Good

In Stock. Sold by Blue Umbrella Books, Fulfilled by Amazon

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

76 Used from $5.96

FREE Shipping on orders over $25.

Deliver to

Turn on 1-Click ordering

In Stock.

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

This item ships to France. Want it Monday, Sept. 17? Order within and choose AmazonGlobal Priority Shipping at checkout. Learn more

List Price: $44.99
Save: $5.05 (11%)

37 New from $16.99

Deliver to

Turn on 1-Click ordering

More Buying Choices

37 New from $16.99 76 Used from $5.96 1 Rentals from $17.21

114 offers from $5.96

See All Buying Options

Free%20Two-Day%20Shipping%20for%20College%20Students%20with%20Amazon%20Student

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. Beautiful Code is an opportunity for master coders to tell their story. All author royalties will be donated to Amnesty International. tion.

Frequently bought together

Total price: $121.67

One of these items ships sooner than the other. Show details

Buy the selected items together

This item:Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly)) by Andy Oram Paperback $39.94
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
FREE Shipping. Details
Beautiful Architecture: Leading Thinkers Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Software Design by Diomidis Spinellis Paperback $43.11
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
FREE Shipping. Details
Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions by Toby Segaran Paperback $38.62
Only 8 left in stock (more on the way).
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
FREE Shipping. Details

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

Robert C. Martin

446

in Software Testing
Paperback
$31.56
Steve McConnell

322

in Client-Server Networking…
Paperback
$28.05
Jon Bentley

90

Paperback
$30.58
Diomidis Spinellis

9

Paperback
$43.11
Andrew Hunt

356

Paperback
$46.50
Andy Oram

11

Paperback
$37.85

Editorial Reviews

Book Description

(none)

About the Author

Andy Oram is an editor at O'Reilly Media, a highly respected book publisher and technology information provider. An employee of the company since 1992, Andy currently specializes in free software and open source technologies. His work for O'Reilly includes the first books ever published commercially in the United States on Linux, and the 2001 title Peer-to-Peer. His modest programming and system administration skills are mostly self-taught.

Greg Wilson holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh, and has worked on high-performance scientific computing, data visualization, and computer security. He is the author of Data Crunching and Practical Parallel Programming (MIT Press, 1995), and is a contributing editor at Doctor Dobb's Journal, and an adjunct professor in Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

Series: Theory in Practice (O'Reilly)
Paperback: 620 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (July 6, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0596510047
ISBN-13: 978-0596510046
Product Dimensions: 7 x 1.4 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 52 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #542,598 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #544 in Books > Textbooks > Computer Science > Software Design & Engineering
- #1221 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Software Design, Testing & Engineering > Software Development
- #1707 in Books > Textbooks > Computer Science > Programming Languages

Would you like to tell us about a lower price?
If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support?

Related media

Customer reviews

Write a customer review

See all 52 customer reviews

Top customer reviews

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

George Datuashvili

Largely waste of time, except very few chapters, and only one is truly great

May 30, 2010

Verified Purchase

This book is a collection of many articles by different authors, which is supposed to illuminate what they behold as beautiful engineering. Now it is said that beauty is in the eye of beholder, and some readers may be amazed by elegance and aha moments through the book. However to me it looks like most articles describe how authors used the plain common sense to architect this or that, and that beautiful aha moment to behold is nowhere to be seen. I was tempted to put the book down most of the time, but kept on reading only in hopes that next chapter by different author about different topic would make it finally worth it.

And one chapter did it! Titled "Accelerated Population Count" by Henry S. Warren, Jr (which is about calculating bit counts in arrays) is truly breathtaking and inspiring. Now, is it worth buying this book just for one small but very good article? Maybe, since A) it's that good, and B) I can't find it mentioned anywhere else, including the truly magnificent "Hacker's Delight" by same Henry S. Warren Jr. (the "Hacker's Delight" describes cool tricks in the bit counting area, but doesn't mention CSA).

If you are interested in the premise of this book, here is my recommendation:
1. Buy the "Programming Pearls", and get to know the real beautiful code 101 by heart
2. Buy the "Hacker's Delight", and keep is as a reference on the bit twiddling algorithms
3. Stop at the library or bookstore for 15 minutes, and read the "Accelerated Population Count" from the "Beautiful Code"

Have fun!

13 people found this helpful14 people found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

Amazon Customer

Requires construction of an intended audience

June 20, 2013

Verified Purchase

I haven't quite finished this yet but I have been enjoying it and Amazon asked me to review it.
You can trust my opinion because I bought the book to test reading textbooks on my first tablet and had very low expectations (the title is a bit of a facepalm :) - the book also donates to charity or something too.

The individual writers mostly fail to impress on us the beauty of the code - when and where they felt it, how it occurred to them and what followed. I feel an existing relationship with the beauty in code helped me appreciate the book.

It also feels unedited: what book are they assembling - something for experienced programmers to appreciate or are they seeking to inspire plebs to read code?

The former is sort of achieved but there's a lot of very skip-able faff.

As inspiration it covers a broad slew of problems (some of which are architectural rather than procedural) and the solutions are often fairly technical. If you happen to have at least considered most of the problems and have solid experience in 10 languages and 3 paradigms, that's fine but it ain't gonna work for the vast majority of devs.

Were I editing this book, I would call it "Code Stories" and insist that an attempt be made to use pseudo-code and diagrams; that the stories be English and the code be formal.

There is savage beauty in C and assembler which provides some of the best entertainment in book. These could be contrasted with modern standards to comic effect imho - that's definitely what I was doing when I read them :)

I want to fix this book which indicates I think it has a lot of value. In it's present form I think the reader has to do a lot of work from a perspective of skill and experience to appreciate it.

2 people found this helpful3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

Robert H. Stine Jr.

It ain't all that beautiful...

November 9, 2008

Verified Purchase

The editors of this uneven book give us 33 chapters from various, often well-known developers, in which these developers describe some code and explain why they think that it is beautiful. There are some gems, but it's not light reading and quite a bit of it is a real slog. If you are a professional programmer, it's probably worth the effort, but otherwise I'd steer clear.

And, in fact, all too much of the code is downright ugly. This starts, sadly enough, with the first example, by Brian Kernighan, describing a limited-capacity regular expression matcher.

Yes, THAT Brian Kernighan, a software god among men. But the example he describes as beautiful would be the last thing I would ever want in any software that I had to maintain. I am sure it is efficient, and it probably works, but the only beauty that I can see is that, if you convince yourself you understand why it works, you've also proven to yourself that your mental abilities put you in an elite category of coder. God help you if you need to modify the method's functionality or (shudder) debug it.

Another dubious entry in the book is by Adam Kolawa, who describes the CERN mathematical library. He claims that no library routine can be beautiful if it uses dynamic memory allocation. The software architecture he deems beautiful passes working memory, in the form of an array to the library routines, which in turn pass it on to their subroutines. In fact, the space used by the input parameters is reused to hold the solution. I am sure that CERN math library is an excellent package, but I would hate to have the job of tracking down bugs in a system in which all the subroutines in the stack were writing back into the same array.

Software ugliness can take many forms, as, for example, in the chapter by Ronald Mak, describing NASA software used for the Mars Rover mission. The solution for a highly reliable, long running, independent system? SOA, using Java 2 and J2EE EJBs. I am a big fan of Java and J2EE, but why on earth (or Mars!) would the Mars Rover system need EJBs? The SOA and EJB technology is at its best when coupling diverse databases and interacting with legacy systems. It brings with it a significant complexity and overhead. Why would anyone think this was appropriate for the Mars Rover?

For my taste, the worst of the worst was an article by R. Kent Dybvig, describing a program for analyzing code and detecting parameter name clashes. The code to be analyzed is in Scheme, a Lisp dialect. It's been awhile since I've fooled with LISP, but I was ready to give it a try. So here is an example of a macro that has potential scope issues, if there is a bound variable t elsewhere in the code:

(or e1 e2) -> (let ([t e1]) (if t t e2))

...and here is the refactored code, in which the problem is fixed:

(or e1 e2) -> (let [g e1] (if g g e2))

I stared dumbly at this for all too long a time until I read the next phrase, "in which 'g' is a generated (fresh) identifier". Here I'd fault the author for a really rotten presentation, and also for begging the question, since the whole problem he is purporting to solve is avoiding name clashes.

In fairness, the book also has many descriptions of genuinely beautiful code. I especially enjoyed the article by Charles Petzold on efficient image processing through code generated on-the-fly. Also, Henry Warren essay on devising efficient algorithms for counting the number of enabled bits in a bit string is fascinating. Yet another stimulating article is by Brian Hayes, who describes an efficient approach for determining if three points are co-linear. This article also uses LISP as the example language, but unlike Dybvig's piece, it's clear, and "porting" the approach to Java or C++ would be straight-forward.

In summary, "Beautiful Code" is a very mixed bag. On balance, it is probably worth reading, but without doubt it is a disappointment.

9 people found this helpful10 people found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

Set up an Amazon Giveaway

Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway

This item: Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly))

Set up a giveaway

Customers who bought this item also bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

Diomidis Spinellis

9

Paperback
$43.11
Robert C. Martin

51

in Computer Hardware Design…
Paperback
$32.00
Andrew Hunt

356

Paperback
$46.50
Robert C. Martin

446

in Software Testing
Paperback
$31.56
Andy Oram

11

Paperback
$37.85
Toby Segaran

21

Paperback
$38.62

Pages with related products. See and discover other items: computer code, design theory, software design patterns

Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly)) 1st Edition

Turn on 1-Click ordering

Turn on 1-Click ordering

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Sponsored products related to this item (What's this?)

Editorial Reviews

Book Description

About the Author

Product details

Related media

Greg Wilson on Beautiful Code

Sponsored products related to this item (What's this?)

Customer reviews

Read reviews that mention

Top customer reviews

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Most recent customer reviews

Set up an Amazon Giveaway

Customers who bought this item also bought

Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly)) 1st Edition

Sorry, there was a problem.

Sorry, there was a problem.

Try the eBook for free On clicking this link, a new layer will be open $0.00 On clicking this link, a new layer will be open

Rent On clicking this link, a new layer will be open $17.21 On clicking this link, a new layer will be open

Buy used On clicking this link, a new layer will be open $22.77 On clicking this link, a new layer will be open

Turn on 1-Click ordering

Buy new On clicking this link, a new layer will be open $39.94 On clicking this link, a new layer will be open

Turn on 1-Click ordering

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Sponsored products related to this item (What's this?)

Editorial Reviews

Book Description

About the Author

Product details

Related media

Related Video Shorts

Sponsored products related to this item (What's this?)

Customer reviews

Read reviews that mention

Top customer reviews

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Most recent customer reviews

Set up an Amazon Giveaway

Customers who bought this item also bought

Try the eBook for free On clicking this link, a new layer will be open

$0.00 On clicking this link, a new layer will be open

Rent On clicking this link, a new layer will be open

$17.21 On clicking this link, a new layer will be open

Buy used On clicking this link, a new layer will be open

$22.77 On clicking this link, a new layer will be open

Buy new On clicking this link, a new layer will be open

$39.94 On clicking this link, a new layer will be open