Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Excellent read for starting software engineer
Comment: I am a software engineer of about 5 years of professional experience. The book is attractive to me because it describes proven best-practices for existing software. There are a large variety of software descriptions in this book. If you are looking for a programming-language-specific book, this book might not be for you, because it contains a wide variety of projects from different programming languages (from Fortran to Python and perl).
For the intermediate or beginning programmer, I'd say this is an excellent read as long as you are able to comprehend the material. Some of the text demands more than a cursory knowledge of programming. I will probably need to reread a few chapters later in my career in order to understand them in the manner they were intended.
The book reads like a book about software pattern implementations, but without the emphasis on the patterns. It is left to the reader to draw generalizations from the examples that they can apply to their own code.
Personally, I'd like to see more books like this. It provides a good frame of reference for the construction of good software.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent lessons in several topics. A great value.
Comment: This book is a great compilation of software design problems and solutions. Each chapter is an essay from one author which covers a particular problem in computer science and/or software engineering.
The chapters are complete discussions within themselves and they offer different insights into how to solve problems. The solutions are geared to issues found in both the natural world and the business world.
Of particular interest (for me) were the chapters on seraching and debugging.
One aspect of the book that will be either a plus or a minus depending on the reader is that because each chapter is by a different author, there are many distinct writting styles used. Since I was looking towards the book to gain insight into how others solve these problems, I found this useful. Since some of the context of the thought process came through in the writting, it was more like talking to the authors rather than just reading a textbook.
The chapter vary considerably in both topic and the thought process that went into the solution so inevitably there will be chapters that interest any programmer.
The books chapters can be read in any order and the editor indexes the chapters well. Information is easy to find.
Programming Pearls is of similar composition but with shorter chapters and explanations. This book goes a step further in both scope and length of explanation.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: great idea, mediocre execution
Comment:
This book came to being from a very good idea. The editors decided to go around and ask renown programmers and designers about snippets of code, software architecture, design or anything related they found beautiful and see as an example of good design.
Indeed, the idea is terrific. After all, besides books describing specific technologies we read on a per-need basis, what books do programmers have to read for inspiration ? Consider artists and architects, for example. They have peer art and work to study and be inspired by. Sure, code reading is highly recommended, but wouldn't it be great if someone had already collected all the good bits ? Wouldn't it be sweet for Brian Kernighan and Yuhikiro Matsumoto to tell you what they've found beautiful ?
Unfortunately, this books doesn't fulfill the high expectations I had from it. It's not bad, no, but it isn't as good as I hoped it to be. There are two main reasons for this:
1. Many of the authors forgot that they're writing for a paper book, and not an online article / blog entry. When reading a paper book, you can't just click on links to find out more information. Therefore, I'd expect many chapters to be more complete. The authors could have spent a few extra lines to explain a concept instead of referencing it to some online resource or (worse) a paid-subscription-access paper at ACM. This is a paper book - I want to read it on the bus to work. Had I wanted to read an online article jumping around links, I would just do that.
2. A few of the chapters in the book are just way too specific. How many people would understand a chapter about LINPAK - a Fortran library for linear algebra manipulation, especially when the author is very parsimonious in explaining the concepts and sends you to linear algebra tomes instead (see complaint #1).
In general, I think that to better execute the idea of such a book, a panel of experts has to be assembled and scrutinize each and every article. I would be much happier to read a book of 10 great articles than a book of 33, of which 10 are great. Who said that each and every programming book should be more than 600 pages long ?
However, I want to finish on a positive note, since as I stated in the beginning, the book is not bad. Here's a list of articles I found really good and interesting. I guess that just for them it was worth to read:
1. Chapter 1, A Regular Expression Matcher, by Brian Kernighan
2. Chapter 2, Subversion's Delta Editor: Interface as Ontology, by Karl Fogel
3. Chapter 3, The Most Beautiful Code I Never Wrote, by Jon Bentley
4. Chapter 8, On-the-Fly Code Generation for Image Processing, by Charles Petzold
5. Chapter 10, The Quest for an Accelerated Population Count, by Henry S. Warren, Jr.
6. Chapter 16, The Linux Kernel Driver Model: The Benefits of Working Together, by Greg Kroah-Hartman
7. Chapter 18, Python's Dictionary Implementation: Being All Things to All People, by Andrew Kuchling
8. Chapter 23, Distributed Programming with MapReduce, by Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat
9. Chapter 28, Beautiful Debugging, by Andreas Zeller
10. Chapter 33, Writing Programs for "The Book," by Brian Hayes
Customer Rating:
Summary: want my copy?
Comment: I bought this book because it was mentioned in a Google Tech Talk about a beautiful Quicksort algorithm.
I was just looking for an interesting book that I could skim through and see some really neat, SHORT examples... but a lot of it requires that you read an entire chapter before you can understand the two pages of C that implements some part of a driver. It personally wasn't what I was looking for.
So it sits on my shelf, barely read and in near mint condition if anyone wants to take it off my hands. It is probably a better book than I think, but I don't really have the time or interest to study other people's supposedly good code.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Learn How to Think
Comment: A frequent topic of discussion among those in any technical field is for a short list of essential books that anyone worth their salt has read. With regards to software engineering, two classics quickly come to mind: Code Complete, and Design Patterns, as well as a recent publication joining the ranks of these epics, Beautiful Code by O'Reilly Media.
What makes Beautiful Code stand apart from the rest, is that it's format is so unconventional when compared to most other programming texts. The book is comprised of 33 Chapters, each written by a different author about a particular bit of code they had written and thought to be particularly eloquent. The best way to explain why this book is so wonderful is to make an analogy about the differences between learning something via a lecture as opposed to a private lesson. Most instructional books will take the lecture approach, where the author shows you one correct way to solve a problem, or complete a certain task and the reader must then digest that as best as possible. Beautiful Code is more like a private lesson in which the author of each chapter is giving the reader personalized attention by explaining their thought processes, how they arrived at each step, and occasionally showing some dead ends that didn't work out. Now consider that these private lessons are being given by such legendary names as Brian Kernighan, Charles Petzold, and Yukihiro Matsumoto - and it becomes obvious why this is a must-have addition to any serious software engineer's bookshelf. Some particularly memorable sections include Karl Fogel's discussion on the origins and implementation of the Subversion Delta Editor and the look inside Google's MapReduce technology by Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat.
As stated earlier, one of the best strengths of this book is that it is language neutral. In each chapter, as the author is speaking from experience on a particular project, rather than writing a chapter for a hypothetical "Better Programming in Language XYZ", you will see code snippets in C#, MSIL, Python, Ruby, and several other languages (There's even one chapter with Emacs Lisp!). This is important because the insight gained from this book will not be diluted from one language falling out of favor or into obsolescence, and allows for the possibility of this title being just as valuable ten years from now.
Many books will teach you how to solve a problem, but rare are those to teach you how to think. Beautiful Code is one of those select few, and will keep you coming back from project to project to consult its veteran sages of computer science. A worthy edition to any serious programmer's library, and hopefully a second volume is not far off.
|
|
|
