Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think

I've read "Beautiful Code", a collection of 33 essays by leading computer scientists, edited by Andy Oram and Greg Wilson. What follows is by no means a review, just my impressions. Chapter 1, A Regular Expression Matcher, by Brian Kernighan. An interesting insight into implementation of a simlified regular expression matches. Shows off recursion-based elegant and compact C code. Chapter 2, Subversion's Delta Editor: Interface as Ontology, by Karl Fogel. Describes a piece of Subversion version control system, the Delta Editor, which is the data structure that express the different between two source code trees. The data structure is really an interface (being implemented in C, a language that doesn't support interfaces natively, it's a structure of function pointers). Instead of representing the delta explicitly, it provides a standard interface for a delta producer to provide the delta data, and of the delta consumer to use it. This way it can handle deltas that can't fit in memory due to sheer size or that are not available all at once (e.g. are downloaded from network). Various advantages of this design are discussed. An interesting approach of representing data as an interface. Chapter 3, The Most Beautiful Code I Never Wrote, by Jon Bentley. Praises brevity and simplicity. Examines the code that analyses QuickSort algorithm (which itself is viewed as the most beautiful code by the author). The performance analysis code gets progressively smaller and smaller and simpler and simpler through careful mathematical analysis. An interesting example of algorithm development and optimization, though, perhaps, mostly of academic value. Chapter 4, Finding Things, by Tim Bray. Explores a few common, if somewhat disconnected, topics related to search. Interesting for a brief instroduction into Ruby language, and its comparison to Java in terms of performance (Java wins). Touches regular expressions, associative arrays, binary search and then quickly discusses web search. I find this chapter rather superficial and unfocused. Chapter 5, Correct, Beautiful, Fast (In That Order): Lessons From Designing XML Verifiers, by Elliotte Rusty Harold. Describes the author's quest to implement verification of XML names in an XML parser correctly, but without sacrificing performance. A few smart improvement eventually lead the author to a surprisingly simple and efficient solution. "If there's a moral to this story, it is this: do not let performance considerations stop you from doing what is right. You can always make the code faster with a little cleverness. You can rarely recover so easily from a bad design". Chapter 6, Framework for Integrated Test: Beauty through Fragility, by Michael Feathers. Describes the desing of Framework for Intergated Testing (FIT), an automated testing framework. Talks how this framework is different from most of other frameworks by being very open, flexible and extensible. This radical alternative to traditional framework design (with few well-defined points of extensibility) proves useful in its application domain (testing). Chapter 7, Beautiful Tests, by Alberto Savoia. Talks of the beauty of testing. Sets off by describing the infamous binary search implementation bug and continues to test the supposedly corrected implementation using JUnit testing framework. Demonstrates the concepts of smoke testing, boundary value testing, testing theories, mutation testing, performance testing. Conclusion: Some tests are beautiful for their simplicity and efficiency Other tests are beautiful becuase, in the process of writing them, they help you improve the code they are meant to test in subtle but important ways Finally, some tests are beautiful for their breadth and thoroughness Chapter 8, On-the-Fly Code Generation for Image Processing. Demonstrates an unusual optimization technique, on-the-fly code generation for time-critical procedures. The trick is that some branching and calculations are performed at code-generation time (once) rather than at

I not yet own this book, but I find its blog wonderful. After reading the table of content, I am sure it is a great book that I will order as soon as it arrives China.

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