Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Mixed articles.
Comment: Some of the chapters in this book are very interesting (population count, analysis of quicksort). Others less so (puffing opensource projects or their authors, or both in the case of the article on crypto). There are some fairly hardline options (e.g., in the article on LINPACK, from my perspective of a C and C++ developer). Some is quite esoteric (e.g., Haskell concurrency - it would be nice to be able to use it, but in my world, it's a struggle to get to use anything but C).
Customer Rating:
Summary: A great peek into some truly brilliant minds
Comment: This book was designed as a way for modern programmers to show how they think: why should a system be designed one way and not another? What makes code beautiful? This book is organized into 33 different chapters, where leading programmers pick a software topic that is beautiful to them, then proceed to describe what makes it so. This book is a fascinating insight into the minds of some leading programmers.
The authors cover many different topics: from Subversion's Delta Editor to Python's Dictionary implementation; from the enterprise system behind the Mars rover to some design decisions behind Ruby. Again, these are all fascinating to look at, but the breadth of material is so varied that it might be difficult for a lot of individuals to really get into. Lead programmers or software architects will likely eat this stuff up, but it'll probably be too much for the average working software developer.
If you are able to get past the fact that each chapter comes from an entirely new author with an entirely new project, this is an interesting book and a great peek into some truly brilliant minds.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Beauty Through Variety
Comment: This book is a great read as it covers many domains and languages. The good range of problems means that you will probably be familiar with at least one of the examples from previous experience (even if you are inexperienced).
It is easy to pick up the book and read any of the chapters independant of the others so it allows you to skip back and forth as you find topics that interest you.
The book teaches a lot of lessons that I wish all programmers had read before they wrote the code that I then have to maintain.
This book is a good general IT read for anyone interested in programming or problem solving in general.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Deep in places, but interesting ideas to challenge you...
Comment: For those of us slogging out code on a day-to-day basis in the trenches, it may be a bit of a stretch to think of programming code as "beautiful". But there really is a special beauty to code that's been well-crafted and designed to stand the test of time and use. Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think by Andy Oram and Greg Wilson is a look into the minds of a number of developers who have very definite ideas of what makes a "beautiful" program or routine. While some chapters are a bit more esoteric than what I could follow, the general flow and idea work well...
Contents:
A Regular Expression Matcher; Subversion's Delta Editor - Interface as Ontology; The Most Beautiful Code I Never Wrote; Finding Things; Correct, Beautiful, Fast (In That Order) - Lessons From Designing XML Verifiers; Framework For Integrated Test - Beauty Through Fragility; Beautiful Tests; On-The-Fly Code Generation For Image Processing; Top Down Operator Precedence; The Quest For An Accelerated Population Count; Secure Communication - The Technology of Freedom; Growing Beautiful Code in Bioperl; The Design of the Gene Sorter; How Elegant Code Evolves With Hardware - The Case of Gaussian Elimination; The Long-Term Benefits of Beautiful Design; The Linux Kernel Driver Model - The Benefits of Working Together; Another Level of Indirection; Python's Dictionary Implementation - Being All Things To All People; Multidimensional Iterators in Numpy; A Highly Reliable Enterprise System for NASA's Mars Rover Mission; ERP5 - Designing for Maximum Adaptability; A Spoonful of Sewage; Distributed Programming With Mapreduce; Beautiful Concurrency; Syntactic Abstraction - The Syntax-Case Expander; Labor-Saving Architecture - An Object-Oriented Framework for Networked Software; Integrating Business Partners The RESTful Way; Beautiful Debugging; Treating Code As An Essay; When A Button Is All That Connects You To The World; Emacspeak - The Complete Audio Desktop; Code In Motion; Writing Programs For "The Book"; Afterword; Contributors; Index
I think by reading the table of contents, you quickly see this isn't a light "For Dummies" read. The contributors on each chapter are some of the most intelligent and influential software designers in the industry today. And the topics aren't light-weight, either. In more than one case, there is a great deal of mathematical and logical theory to prove certain designs. Unless you have a serious background in computer science, it's safe to say that you won't get nearly as much out of those chapters as the authors are trying to convey. I know I definitely fell into that category a number of times...
Having said that, I *did* get value out of many other chapters. For instance, "A Spoonful of Sewage" shows what happens when a beautiful design ("wine") is compromised with a minor flaw or hack ("sewage"). Regardless of how fine the wine is, the net result is a spoiled, ruined vat of sewage. I was reminded that it's important to not make those design compromises for the sake of expediency. Another good example is the "When A Button..." chapter. How do you design a system when the sole means of input for someone is a single button? The developers here faced that issue when they were asked to design some software for use by Stephen Hawkings, a brilliant scientist who is severely physically disabled. The sense of what's "beautiful" is tested by constraints that most of us have never considered or imagined...
I don't imagine that most people would read this book cover-to-cover with the idea that every chapter would be applicable and personal. Writing styles vary, and the technical level of some chapters is *very* deep. But nearly any software developer should be able to read the book and extract a number of ideas that will improve their mindset and approach to what they do on a daily basis... writing beautiful code.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Too Eclectic to be of General Value
Comment: If you are thinking about buying this book to read many beautiful code samples that will help you lift your game, it doesn't fulfill that purpose very well. Many of the examples are from relatively eclectic and obscure domains in different programming languages. Some of it was stuff that I'm already doing.
Might be fun to skim what interests you in a coffee shop, but unless you're prepared to invest a lot of time in studying this tome for comparatively little value, just pass on it.
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