Beautiful Code
by Andy Oram, Greg Wilson · first published 2007
49% recommend47% neutral3% critical
Why HN recommends it
Collection of essays by different programmers walking through code they find elegant, from Pike's regex matcher to Subversion and MapReduce. Narrative and non-prescriptive; suits programmers who like reading code.
Common criticism: Some find the examples not that beautiful or the book overrated
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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 construc
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…books, you might want narrative texts rather than "practical" books, since the practical ones require you to also have a computer, and work through the examples and such. Books like Programming Pearls, Beautiful Code, etc. tell stories about code, rather than just show you code (though there are probably moments in either book where the best course of action is to try applying what you've read about).
on “Ask HN: Programming books to read while on vacation?” ↗For those who don't know, this is Rob Pike's chapter of Beautiful Code, a thoroughly enjoyable book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers-P... . Every now and then I read a different chapter, and it's always interesting. I particularly liked Rob Pike's…
on “A regular expression matcher By Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan (2007)” ↗During my undergrad I semi-randomly picked out "Beautiful Code" [0] from our university library. Not sure why it never features in such lists but I thoroughly enjoyed it. :) [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers-Pr...
on “Software engineering books” ↗Have a look at the book 'Beautiful code' http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers-Pra...
on “Ask HN: Open Source projects consisting of Beautiful Code to improve hacker skills?” ↗Chapter 28 in Beautiful Code (http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers-Pra...) talks about delta debugging, how it was invented and developed. its really a great chapter in a great book. i can't recommend it enough.
on “Delta Debugging” ↗…would be interesting to read here: https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=language%3A%22c%22&ref=si... Relevant links: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/925754/resources-for-lear..., http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers-Pra... > Embedded development (I don't even know where to start that one...) I am currently learning embedded development (maybe we could help each other?).
on “HMO: Help Me Out” ↗…code... when I dialed out with a modem for the first time, before the Internet... and when I tried NCSA Mosaic. Anyway, I still get that weird feeling now sometimes. Elixir did it. ;) You might enjoy Beautiful Code if you haven't checked it out yet: http://smile.amazon.com/Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers-P...
on “Elixir – The next big language for the web” ↗Code Complete 2 by Steve McConnel Clean Code by Robert Martin Beautiful Code by Andy Ormen, Greg Wilson Refactoring 2 by Martin Fowler
on “Best book for good programming practices” ↗I have once already: https://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers-Pr... I liked it, but I'm not going to be paying for this sort of thing often. I think a lot would hinge on having content that was high quality, and being able to persuade me that…
on “Build Your Own React” ↗There is a chapter by Hank Warren all about popcount in the Beautiful Code book, https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/beautiful-code/97805965... and there is much more along similar lines in Warren’s book Hacker’s Delight https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker's_Delight My…
on “Counting set bits in an interesting way” ↗I've heard this book was good http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers-Pra.... It asks 30 different developers for pieces of beautiful code. I read an excerpt or two back when it was released and put it on my to read list. Unfortunately haven't gotten…
on “Ask HN: What source code is worth studying?” ↗This is discussed best in the opening chapter of O'Reilly's Beautiful Code: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510046. Google Books has a readable snippet of the section at http://bit.ly/g34QRh, but I highly recommend buying the book because it is a great read.
on “Why GNU grep is fast” ↗You might be interested in http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers-Pra... I believe one of the examples they gave in C was the diff algorithm from Subversion.
on “Ask HN: Examples of beautiful C code?” ↗If you want to learn about STM, I recommend Simon Peyton-Jones' Beautiful Concurrency, which is a chapter of the Beautiful Code book: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/74063/beautiful.pdf
on “Software Transactional Memory in Clojure” ↗http://smile.amazon.com/Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers-P... This book might help. H&P is great, by the way. It was that book and "Cathedral & The Bazaar" that made me quit a Microsoft-only job and go open-source.
on “Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?” ↗