Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22233 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-26
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 618 pages

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.

Customer Reviews

Uneven, Uninteresting
There's a critical need for a book on code aesthetics, elegance and comprehensibility that goes beyond simple style guidelines -- this isn't that book. The contributions are uneven, a few border on the incomprehensible, and most are simply not worth the time. There are no revelations or insights to be had.

dont see the point of this book
i regret buying this book. i dont see the beauty of the code nor do i see how many of the contributors think. much of the material described here is accessible else where and probably in a more readable and enjoyable form.

the map reduce article is lame compared to its original version. the authors had to put something in there from google, i felt.

the beautiful concurrency in haskell is overstated.

Interesting Code
This book is a mixed box of chocolates. Don't read it expecting a lot of useful ideas on how to improve your code: It's more of a book you read to widen your horizon a bit. Each chapter stands on its own and talks about a different project. Languages include C, Java, Perl, Python, Lisp and others.

Fortunately, most authors don't dwell too much on their definitions of "beautiful" code (a rough consensus appears to be that beautiful code is readable, concise, efficient, and, surprise, does something useful). The meat of this book are code fragments and explanations of the code and algorithms (and their context).

Despite the explanations, several of the chapters left me scratching my head. Understanding and appreciating all of the code (including that from unfamiliar languages and domains) requires a lot of effort.

Curious to see if they'll come up with an "Ugly Code" book next. Should be more fun ("Daily WTF", anyone?) and less pretentious. Plus, I dare say, they could even re-use some of the chapters from this book...